Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  16 Ibid., 175–176; June 2/3, 1880.

  17 Ibid., 179; June 3/4, 1880.

  18 Ibid., 177–179; June 3/4, 1880.

  19 Ibid.

  20 Ibid.

  21 DVS, 2: 396.

  22 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 180; June 5, 1880.

  23 Ibid., 182; June 7, 1880.

  24 Levitt, Russian Literary Politics, 83–85.

  25 Ibid., 85.

  26 Ibid., 86.

  27 Letopis, zhizni i tvorchestvo F. M. Dostoevskogo, ed. N. F. Budanova and G. M. Fridlender, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1995), 2: 429.

  28 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 182; June 7, 1880.

  29 Ibid.

  30 PSSiP, 15: 66.

  31 Ibid., 68.

  32 Ibid., 69.

  33 Ibid., 69–70.

  34 Ibid., 70.

  35 Ibid., 73–74.

  36 Ibid.

  37 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 182; June 7, 1880.

  38 Quoted in PSSiP, 15: 827.

  39 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 183; June 7, 1880. See also ibid., 354.

  40 Letopis, 3: 430.

  41 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 183; June 7, 1880.

  42 Levitt, Russian Literary Politics, 122.

  43 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 184; June 8, 1880.

  44 DVS, 2: 398.

  45 An account is given in the commentary to the speech contained in PSS, 26: 445–451.

  46 Dostoevsky is not so much citing Pushkin as rewriting him. In the poem, the elder of the Gypsy tribe simply says to Aleko after the murder: “Ostav nac, gordy chelovek” (“Leave us, proud man”). There is nothing about humbling oneself or toiling on thy native soil. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols. (Moscow, 1949), 2: 240.

  47 The reference to Liza was followed by one to Natasha Rostov of War and Peace, but it was drowned out by the storm of applause for Liza. See PSS, 26: 496.

  48 DVS, 2: 418.

  49 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 184–185; June 8, 1880.

  50 DVS, 2: 453.

  51 PSS, 26: 461.

  52 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 185; June 8, 1880.

  53 Ibid.

  54 Ibid., 358.

  55 Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 235.

  56 Quoted in I. Volgin, Posledny god Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1986), 300–301.

  57 PSSiP, 12/Bk. 2: 272.

  58 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 186; June 10, 1880.

  CHAPTER 57

  Controversies and Conclusions

  Back in Staraya Russa, Dostoevsky dispatched a letter to Countess Sofya Tolstaya, who, along with Vladimir Solovyev and the singer and composer Yulia Abaza, had signed a collective telegram congratulating him on his Pushkin success. He repeats in brief much of what we already know, including the glowing spontaneous responses of Turgenev and Annenkov (“the latter absolutely an enemy to me”), and adds an extra detail: “ ‘I’m not saying that because you praised my Liza,’ Turgenev told me.” Apologizing for “talking so much about myself,” Dostoevsky insists, “I swear it isn’t vanity: one lives for such moments, it’s for them that you in fact come into this world. My heart is full—how can I help telling my friends. I’m still stunned.”1

  As a veteran campaigner in the Russian social-cultural wars, Dostoevsky was under no illusions that he would emerge unscathed or that battle would not rapidly be joined. “Don’t worry—I’ll soon hear ‘the laughter of the crowd’ ” (a citation from Pushkin), he assures the countess. “I won’t be forgiven this in various literary dark alleys and tendencies.” From the summaries of his speech in the newspapers, he already saw that two of his main points were being overlooked. One is Pushkin’s “universal responsiveness,” which “comes completely from our national spirit.” Hence Pushkin “is in fact our most national poet.” The second point was that “I gave a formula, a word of reconciliation for all our parties, and showed the way out to a new era. That’s what everyone in fact felt, but the newspaper correspondents either didn’t understand that or refused to.”2 He was convinced that he had been understood by the public, regardless of what the newspapers were saying or what the monthly journals would print in their next issues.

  On June 15 Dostoevsky wrote to Yulia Abaza, responding to a story of hers on which she asked him to comment. Dostoevsky’s criticism furnishes him an occasion to release the anti-Semitic animus that now more and more dominated his thoughts. The idea of Abaza’s story, as Dostoevsky defines it, is “that races of people who have received their original idea from their founders, and who subordinate themselves to it exclusively over several generations, subsequently must necessarily degenerate into something separate from humanity as a whole, and even, in the best conditions, into something inimical to humanity as a whole—that idea is true and profound.” Whether Abaza presented this idea as being embodied in the Jewish people is not clear, but Dostoevsky interprets Jewish history as an instance of this general law. “Such, for instance, are the Jews [evrei] beginning with Abraham, and continuing to the present when they have turned into Yids [zhidy]. Christ (besides the rest of his significance) was the correction of this idea, expanding into pan-humanness [vsechelovechnost’—a key term in the Pushkin speech]. But the Jews refused the correction and remained in all their former narrowness and inflexibility, and therefore instead of pan-humanness have turned into the enemies of humanity, denying everyone except themselves, and now really remain the bearers of the Antichrist and, of course, will be triumphant for a while.”3

  Dostoevsky had always claimed that neither he nor the Russian people nurtured any hostility toward the Jewish religion, but his previous identification of “Yiddism” with the materialism of the modern world had by now hardened into dogma. The Jews had become the agents of the Antichrist who would dominate the world for a time—as predicted in Dostoevsky’s favorite book of Revelation—before the world would be redeemed by the Russian Christ and the vsechelovechnost’ of the Russian people. But meanwhile, the reign of darkness was at hand, and the Jews “are coming, they have filled all of Europe, everything selfish, everything inimical to humanity, all of mankind’s evil passions are for them—how could they not triumph, to the world’s ruination!”4 Such a passage shows him at the very worst of his anti-Semitic animosity.

  On July 6, a letter to Lyubimov accompanied the first chapters of Book 11 of The Brothers Karamazov, the completion being promised for the August issue. “The final twelfth book,” he writes, would be published in September, and then, “for the October issue there will follow . . . a short ‘Epilogue.’ ” Meanwhile, however, he has “been held up a bit by the publication of the Diary,” which now, besides his Pushkin speech, will include “a rather long foreword and, I think, an afterword, in which I want to say a few words in reply to my dear critics.”5 The Russian press was filled with commentaries on Dostoevsky’s speech, as well as reprints of it in whole or in part.

  “I undertook to read everything written about me and my Moscow speech in the newspapers,” Dostoevsky explains to Elena Shtakenshneider, “and I decided to reply to Gradovsky, that is, not so much to Gradovsky as to write our whole profession de foi [profession of faith] for all of Russia.” G. K. Gradovsky, a professor of civil law at the University of Moscow, had published a respectful but critical article on Dostoevsky’s speech, entitled “Dreams and Reality,” in Voice. Dostoevsky probably chose Gradovsky’s article as the target of his reply because it was such a well-reasoned statement of the liberal Westernizing position, free from the acerbities of critics influenced by radical ideas. He felt it essential to take up the polemical cudgels because, as he told his correspondent, a positive attitude toward Russia had disturbed the Petersburg press and thus “has to be sullied, destroyed, distorted, and everyone has to be dissuaded: ultimately nothing new happened, they say, it was just the good humor of kindly hearts after Moscow dinners.” But something new had happened, in Dostoevsky’s view, and he considered the task of asserting it so important that he wrote his afterword about Gradovsky on his son’s birthday. “Guests came, and I sat to the side and finished up the work.”6
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  His irate words hardly do justice to the temperate tone of Gradovsky’s article. Still, while praising Dostoevsky’s comprehension of Pushkin as a poet, Gradovsky refuses to accept the social-historical implications that are drawn from Pushkin’s work. Driven to a fury, Dostoevsky counterattacked with all the considerable rhetorical resources at his command. Written as an afterword to an explanatory introduction and the reprinting of his speech, Dostoevsky’s answer is indeed a profession de foi, a declaration of principles rather than an attempt to reason with his opponent so as to convince him to alter his ideas. “You and I will never come to an agreement,” he rightly says, “and so I have no intention whatsoever of trying to persuade or dissuade you.” Indeed, Dostoevsky asserts that he is not addressing himself to Gradovsky at all but rather to his own readers. “I hear, I sense, I even see the rise of new elements who are longing for a new word, who have grown weary of the old liberal snickering over any word of hope for Russia” (26: 149). His article contains a summary of his beliefs and convictions as they had already been expressed in the Diary of a Writer, but these ideas had previously been set down with reference to one or another topical subject. Here they are stated boldly and unequivocally, asserted in their own right, and often supported by the same autobiographical anecdotes already used to illustrate the personal roots of his convictions.

  First he deals with Gradovsky’s charge that, if Russians wished to “enlighten” themselves, they must draw such “enlightenment” from Western European sources. But what does Gradovsky mean, Dostoevsky inquires, when he speaks of enlightenment? Does he mean “the sciences of the West, practical knowledge, trade, or spiritual enlightenment? If the first, then all such ideas could come from Europe, “and we truly have no way to escape them, and no reason to try.” But if he means “spiritual enlightenment that illuminates the soul, enlightens the heart, guides the mind, and shows it a path in life,” then Russians have no need to appeal to Western European sources. “I maintain that our people were enlightened long ago, when they took Christ and His teachings as their very essence.” He then sketches, in vivid images, the endless sufferings endured by the Russian people throughout their history—years during which they had nothing but Christ to cling to as consolation. But he knows very well that “my words will seem childish babble” to those of Gradovsky’s persuasion, indeed, “almost indecent” (26: 150–151).

  Dostoevsky’s denunciation of the West, with all its “enlightenment,” reduces the entire social-political situation of that part of the world to an illustration of the two slogans that presumably define the European moral horizon: Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous (Everyone for himself, and God for all), and Après moi, le déluge! (After me, the flood!). These are the slogans of the most arrant and egoistic individualism, and they rule all of Western social-political life. These sayings “everyone there serves and believes in. At least all those who stand above the people, who keep them in check, who own the land and the proletariat, and who stand on guard for ‘European enlightenment.’ Why do we need that kind of enlightenment? We will find another sort here at home” (26: 152–153).

  The Russian “wanderers,” Gradovsky had argued, were fleeing from the intolerable realities of Russian social life as represented by the characters of Gogol. The only solution Dostoevsky offers, as Gradovsky righly charges, is in terms whose tacit social dimension was a submission to the existing social-polical order, with vaguely hopeful intimations of some impending tsarist benevolence. Dostoevsky picks up this challenge by arguing that such Gogolian types, even though seemingly rooted in Russian life, had really become as alienated from the people as “the wanderers.” In truth, according to Dostoevsky, Aleko, Onegin, and others like them were the products of a European education, and “their relation to the people was that of a master to a serf.” If they had not been so haughty, if they had not begun “to marvel at their own nobility and superiority,” they might “have seen that they themselves were also Derzhimordas [a policeman in Gogol’s Inspector-General] . . . [and] they might have found a path toward reconciliation” (26: 157).

  Gradovsky regarded “the wanderers” as “normal and admirable, admirable by the very fact that they fled from the Derzhimordas.” Indeed, Gradovsky had praised them “for their hatred of the slavery that oppressed the people,” adding that “they loved the people in their own way, ‘in a European way,’ if you like. But who, if not they, prepared our society for the abolition of serfdom?” Dostoevsky refuses such a claim outright, retorting that those who fled from Russia in “civic sorrow” did not hate serfdom “for the sake of the Russian peasant who worked for them and fed them and who, accordingly, was oppressed by them, as well as by the others.” Why, if “the wanderers” were “so overcome by civic sorrow that they had to run off to the gypsies or the barricades of Paris” (an allusion to Turgenev’s Rudin, a character based on Bakunin), had they not “simply liberated their serfs with land”? Of course they would have had no income, and “one still needs money to live in ‘gay Paree’ ” (26: 157–158).

  With a sideswipe at Herzen that all his readers would understand, Dostoevsky speaks of those who “mortgaged, sold, or exchanged (is there any difference?) their peasants and, taking the money thus raised, went off to Paris to support the publication of radical French newspapers and magazines for the salvation of humanity.” (Herzen had helped Proudhon finance the publication of his newspaper.) Dostoevsky accuses “the wanderers” of having such a low opinion of the Russian peasantry that they thought flogging them was still necessary. (Indeed, in a lengthy tirade against Turgenev in 1879 to Evgeny Opochinin, he asserted that all those Russian peasants Turgenev treats so poetically were flogged by his mother, adding, in an unworthy taunt, that Turgenev “would not renounce this pleasure” if it had still been allowed.)7 He refers to all the scabrous anecdotes circulating about peasant family life among “those whose own family lives were frequently houses of ill repute,” and who accepted “the latest European ideas in the fashion of Lucrezia Floriani” (26: 159).8 This gibe is again aimed at Herzen, who had written about the affair of his own wife with the radical German poet Georg Herwegh, and who himself fathered several children with the wife of his best friend Nikolay Ogarev.

  To illustrate the contempt with which such “enlightened” Russians looked down upon the people, he then recounts an incident recently made public in Annenkov’s The Extraordinary Decade. After dinner “at a lovely Moscow dacha” in 1845, a party of “most humane professors, celebrated lovers and connoisseurs of the arts, . . . renowned democrats who subsequently became prominent figures of worldwide importance, critics, writers, and charmingly learned ladies” all went for a stroll. Catching sight of a group of peasants who had been working all day gathering the harvest, which caused the women partially to undress because of the discomfort of laboring all day in the burning sunlight, one wag remarked that “the Russian woman is the only one in the world who feels no shame in front of anyone!” Another added that “it is only the Russian [woman] before whom no one feels ashamed about anything!” Others objected, but Dostoevsky was convinced that even they would not have seen the point. “Why, it was for you, the universal wanderers, that she was working; it was her labor that let you eat your fill!” (26: 159–160)

  Once again, quite unjustifiably, Dostoevsky declines to accord “the wanderers” any credit for having helped to prepare the way for the abolition of serfdom, “though naturally, all this entered into the overall total and was of use.” Of far more weight, in his opinion, was the work of someone like the Slavophil Yury Samarin, who took an active part in the preparation of the reform and was a member of the commission that wrote the final statutes. Gradovsky, he notes, makes no reference at all to such people, “who were utterly unlike the wanderers.” These latter became “quickly bored . . . and once more they began to sulk squeamishly.” On receiving the “redemption” payments for their former serfs, “they began selling their lands and forests to merchants and kulaks to be cut down and dest
royed; the wanderers settled abroad, beginning our practice of absenteeism.” As a result, Dostoevsky “simply cannot consent to accept this image, so dear to you [Gradovsky], of the superior and liberal person as the ideal of the real, normal Russian” (26: 160–161).

  Extremely effective as a polemicist when drawing on such concrete examples of Russian life, Dostoevsky is much less so when forced to cope with more general ideas, such as, for example, Gradovsky’s sally that “personal betterment in the spirit of Christian love” is not sufficient to bring about a fundamental moral improvement in society. Even if such landowners as Korobochka and Sobakevich (characters in Dead Souls) had been “perfect Christians,” their faith, according to Gradovsky, would not have abolished serfdom. Although Dostoevsky cleverly seizes on this notion of “perfection” to advance his own case, the argument he propounds is far from being persuasive. No genuine, perfect Christian, he insists, could possibly own slaves, even though there will continue to be masters and servants; and Dostoevsky cites St. Paul’s epistles to his servant Timothy to prove that with perfect Christian love “there will no longer be masters, nor will servants be slaves.” Father Zosima had already preached this inner Christian transformation of the master-servant relationship from one of dominance to that of mutual affection, and Dostoevsky now holds up the image of “a future perfect society” in which people like Kepler, Kant, and Shakespeare would be freely served by persons recognizing their importance for humanity. By serving such geniuses voluntarily, the person doing so would demonstrate that “I am in no way beneath thee in moral worth and that, as a person, I am equal to thee” (26: 163–164).

  Dostoevsky asserts his belief in the Christian ideal as an act of faith. “If I believe that the truth is here, in those very things in which I put my faith, then what does it matter to me if the whole world rejects my faith, mocks me, and travels a different road?” The value of such an ideal cannot “be measured in terms of immediate benefit, but is directed toward the future, toward eternal ends and absolute joy” (26: 164). This is the vision that Dostoevsky upholds as the Russian answer to Western “enlightenment.”