Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Kavelin’s tone of lofty professorial self-assurance also provoked Dostoevsky to an extremely rare outburst of self-praise. “The Inquisitor and the chapter about children,” he confides to his notebook. “In view of these chapters, you [Kavelin] could regard me from a scientific point of view; but not so arrogantly when it concerns philosophy, although philosophy is not my specialty. Even in Europe, such a force of atheistic expression does not exist, nor did it ever. Therefore, it is not like a child that I believe in Christ and profess faith in him, but rather, my hosanna has come through the great crucible of doubt, as the devil says in that same novel of mine” (27: 86). Kavelin’s criticisms prompted Dostoevsky to probe and clarify his own convictions carefully, and it is unfortunate that his response remains only fragmentary.

  Another note returns to the same point. “The scoundrels [his critics] provoke me with an ignorant and retrograde faith in God. These asses could not even dream of such a powerful negation of God as is depicted in the Inquisitor and in the preceding chapter, to which the entire novel serves as an answer. It is not like a fool or a fanatic that I believe in God. And they want to teach me, and sneer at my backwardness. Yes, their stupidity could not dream of as strong a negation as I went through. They teach me! . . . Ivan Feodorovich is profound, not one of the contemporary atheists, who demonstrate in their disbelief only the paltriest narrowness of their stupid abilities” (27: 48).

  On December 3, Dostoevsky replied to a letter that Ivan Aksakov had sent a month earlier. “The main reason for the delay,” he writes, is “my very bad health . . . my emphysema has worsened.”4 The letter is devoted to the cultural-ideological issues that were in the forefront for both Dostoevsky and his correspondent, and Dostoevsky now expresses an unqualified hostility to the historical legacy of Peter the Great. He finds that Aksakov, having written that Peter “moved us into Europe and gave us European civilization,” had not sufficiently stressed the unhappy consequences of this presumably beneficial feat. Peter’s reforms, Dostoevsky insists, had divided Russian society into layers—“the authorities, the enserfed masses, and the city dwellers, with fourteen classes among them. That’s Peter’s work. Liberate the people and it would seem that Peter’s work was undone. But the belt, the zone between the authorities and the masses won’t retreat for anything and won’t give up its privilege of ruling the broad masses.” The social transformation, begun with the liberation of the serfs, had ground to a halt, and Aksakov should have made clear that as a result of the European civilization imported by Peter, “what in fact lies between the authorities and the people like a fatal belt [is] made up of the ‘best people’ from the fourteen classes.”5

  His notes at this time echo the same antagonism to Peter the Great. One reads, “Nihilism appeared in our country because we are all Nihilists. . . . (All are Feodor Pavloviches right down to the last man.)” Dostoevsky ridicules “the wise men” who wonder where the Nihilists came from: “No, . . . we are not Nihilists, we simply want to save Russia by rejecting her (i.e., form a layer of aristocrats above the people, raising the people up to our own nothingness)” (27: 54). In the only issue of the Diary that Dostoevsky was able to complete before his death, he proposes that this “fatal belt” be swept away entirely.

  By December 9, the two-volume edition of The Brothers Karamazov was ready. Dostoevsky began to distribute gift copies among his friends and family, and one was sent to Pobedonostsev, who advised him to present the book in person to Tsarevich Alexander. The heir to the throne and his consort, Marya Feodorovna, received him a week later at the Anichkov Palace. The only account of this presentation was left by Lyubov Dostoevskaya, then still a child, who probably relays what her mother had been told by Pobedonostsev. Her father behaved in the presence of royalty exactly “as he was accustomed to behave in the salons of his friends. He spoke first, rose when he found that the conversation had gone on sufficiently long, and, taking leave of the Tsarevich and his wife, quitted the room as he had always done, turning his back” to his hosts. The tsarevich reportedly “was not offended by this, and later spoke of my father with esteem.”6

  An informative account of Dostoevsky at this time has been left by Dimitry Merezhkovsky, one of the most important Russian novelists and critics of the twentieth century (his two-volume study, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, did much to shape later critical opinion about both writers). The fifteen-year-old Merezhkovsky had begun to write poetry, and his father seized the opportunity to obtain a professional opinion about his son’s adolescent scribblings after meeting Dostoevsky by chance in the salon of Countess Sofya Tolstaya. “I remember,” Merezhkovsky wrote in an autobiographical fragment, “the diminutive apartment in Kuznechny Alley with its low ceiling and cramped living room, piled with copies of The Brothers Karamazov, and the study, almost as narrow, in which Feodor Mikhailovich sat over galleys. Blushing, turning pale, stuttering, I read my childish, paltry verses. He listened silently, with impatient annoyance. We must have been disturbing him. ‘Weak, bad, worth nothing,’ he said at last. ‘In order to write well, one must suffer, suffer!’ ‘No,’ said my father, ‘let him not write any better, only let him not suffer.’ I recall the pellucid and penetrating look of the pale blue eyes when Dostoevsky shook my hand. I never saw him again, and then very shortly learned that he had died.”7

  On December 27, Dostoevsky wrote a note to Countess Anna Komarovskaya, accepting her invitation to come to the Winter Palace at five on the afternoon of December 30. This titled lady was a member of the intimate court circle with which he had become acquainted, and at her request he read from his works for the guests she had assembled. Among them was Countess Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya, a distant relative of the novelist, who had spent her life as lady-in-waiting to one or another grand duchess but whose cultivation and intelligence were valued so highly by Tolstoy that she became one of his epistolary confidantes. Dostoevsky was eager to meet and speak with her about the enigmatic sage of Yasnaya Polyana, and she, on whom Crime and Punishment had produced an ineffaceable impression (“no other novel had ever stirred me so strongly”), had been impatient to make his acquaintance. Once the introduction was over, he immediately posed a question about Tolstoy, in whom, the countess notes, he took “a passionate interest.” “Can you explain his new tendency?” he asked. The countess admitted that it was “mysterious” to her as well, but she promised to produce Tolstoy’s letter, where he spoke about all this—on the condition that he come to visit her for its transmission.8

  He set January 11 as the date, and we shall abandon chronology a bit to round out this episode. “This enchanting and unique evening has remained fixed in my memory forever,” the countess continues. “I heard Dostoevsky with reverence: he spoke, like a true Christian, about the fate of Russia and the whole world; his eyes burned, and I felt in him a prophet.” The countess, a devout Christian, had broken into tears when her cousin Lev had announced to her in 1878 that he no longer accepted the divinity of Christ or regarded him as the Saviour, and the letter she read to Dostoevsky contained many of the same sentiments. “I can see Dostoevsky before me now, as he clutched his head and in a despairing voice repeated: ‘Not that! Not that!’ He did not sympathize with a single thought of Lev Nikolaevich; despite which he gathered up all the writing lying on the table: the original and the copy of Lev’s letter. From some of his words I concluded that the desire was stirring within him to dispute the false ideas of Lev Nikolaevich.”9 Countess Tolstaya’s intuition was quite accurate, and although he did not live to carry out this intention, his last notebook contains the entry: “To what extent man has worshipped himself (Lev Tolstoy)” (27: 43).

  The new year 1881 found Dostoevsky in a buoyant mood, despite the occasionally gloomy predictions in his letters and conversations. To Grigorovich, sometime in the early part of January, he said that he doubted whether he would live out the winter months,10 but Anna wrote that “in the first half of January Feodor Mikhailovich was in excellent spirits. He frequented his friends, and ev
en agreed to take part in some private theatrics that the Countess S. A. Tolstaya intended to stage. He wished to play the part of the ascetic recluse in the play The Death of Ivan the Terrible by A. K. Tolstoy, the countess’s deceased husband.”11 His emotions probably wavered constantly, depending on his mood; and since he understood so well the importance of hope in resisting despair, he would have struggled against the occasional onslaughts of dejection brought on by his increasingly physical debility.

  One catches a glimpse of Dostoevsky in the memoirs of his former proofreader, Varvara Timofeyeva, on which we have already drawn so extensively. When she passed him in the street at the beginning of 1881, he failed to recognize her, and she was too timid to approach him; but her words indicate the change of sentiment about him on the part of her generation. “I so much wished to go to him, hear his voice again, tell him how deeply I now understood him, and how much that was good he had brought to me. . . . I felt myself to be his disciple, indebted to him for my moral world, my spiritual freedom.”12 Such emotions were not the result only of personal acquaintance, as can be seen from the memoirs of a writer now fallen into oblivion, A. V. Kruglov. “I was walking along the Nevsky Prospect with a medical student. Dostoevsky happened to come past us in a carriage. The medical student quickly, before I could do so myself, raised his hat. ‘Do you perhaps know Dostoevsky?’ I asked. ‘No, but what does that matter? I did not bow to him, but bared my head as I did in Moscow when I walked past the statue of Pushkin.’ ”13

  He had become a revered, symbolic figure who stood above the merciless battle of ideologies. His works had raised all the burning issues of the day far beyond the limits of a narrow partisanship. While Dostoevsky was being pilloried by the liberal and radical press, the presumably left-wing students were receiving him with open arms; and the reason, as his friend Orest Miller wrote in the January issue of the Populist Slavophil journal The Week, was that he always spoke “openly and boldly in all directions, not worrying what would be said about him. The youth welcome, with the discernment of the heart, everything straightforward and unservile.”14

  While he was organizing the notes for the January issue of his Diary, others for February and March piled up. Several articles written by Suvorin shortly after Dostoevsky’s decease provide information about what the future Diary might have contained. One comment reveals the astonishing paradox of Dostoevsky’s social-political position—the dream of an ideal Russia coming to birth in a state embodying the very opposite of what such a dream was striving to attain. “In his opinion,” Suvorin writes, “it is possible for us to attain complete freedom, a freedom existing nowhere else, and all this without any revolution, any restrictions, any controls.”15 In a conversation about the continuation of The Brothers Karamazov, Suvorin heard from the author that “Alyosha Karamazov would emerge as the hero of the novel’s continuation, a hero from whom [Dostoevsky] wished to create a type of Russian Socialist, not the usual type that we know and which sprouted entirely out of European soil.”16 Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich recalls Suvorin as having also quoted these words: “It seems to you [Suvorin—J. F.] that in my last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, there was much that was prophetic. But wait for the continuation. In it Alyosha will leave the monastery and become an anarchist. And my pure Alyosha will kill the Tsar.”17 If there is any mistake in the testimony of the grand duke, it would be in characterizing Alyosha as an “anarchist” rather than as the much more plausible “Russian Socialist,” a term that receives some support from the Diary.

  On January 22, Anna records in her notebook that, in speaking of their plans for the summer, they had discussed a long-cherished ambition to purchase a country estate. “In the evening,” she writes, “we talked about where to go, and he spoke of his dreams.”18 With the money still owed him by The Russian Messenger and the subscriptions pouring in for the new Diary, he thought it possible. On the twenty-fourth, he was a dinner guest of Countess Tolstaya and borrowed a copy of her late husband’s play about Ivan the Terrible to prepare for the theatrics, and he also made the final corrections to the Diary. The next day, January 25, he went to the printing plant with these pages and asked that galleys be sent the day following. He also wrote to Countess Komarovskaya, accepting her invitation to the Winter Palace on the first day he thought he would be free, January 29.

  At times, in these pages for the Diary, he comes dangerously close not only to criticizing government policy but also to impugning its very basis. “I believe as a matter of economics,” he writes in a passage that could well be considered subversive, “that the land is possessed, not by railway magnates, not by the industrialists, not by the millionaires, not by the banks, and not by the Yids, but only by those who cultivate it . . . the tillers of the soil are themselves the state, its nucleus, its vital core.” But the financing of railways, which were built at a speed much greater than in Europe, was done “when the land was most in need of [capital]” (27: 10). No wonder he was so concerned about getting this issue of the Diary through the censorship! It was impossible for him to expatiate any further on the question of “possession” without implying that the peasants should not be required to buy back their own land from those who had no right to its ownership.

  Naturally, the government had always been concerned with the peasants; numerous commissions had been appointed over the years to study their “economic health” and every aspect of their way of life (27: 13). Dostoevsky insists, however, that the people have become totally alienated from all the social institutions of Russia because the zemstvos and the courts are all under the control of the bureaucracy. Even the obshchina, that bastion of Russian peasant democracy, “seems to be moving toward becoming a kind of authority” because its elections are now overseen by “some government official or other” (27: 17).

  Indeed, the more the authorities try to aid the people, the worse the situation becomes. Their total misunderstanding of the people derives from a failure to grasp the importance of Orthodoxy, which constitutes the very essence of the people’s being. Dostoevsky writes: “I am speaking now not about church buildings and not about sermons; I am speaking about our Russian Socialism (and . . . I am taking this word, which is quite the opposite of all that the church represents, to explain my idea)” (27: 18). In daring to apply the phrase “Russian Socialism” to his own messianic hope, he employs a term first coined by Herzen to predict that the peasant-based cooperative social institutions of Russia, such as the obshchina and the artel, would take the lead over Europe in creating the Socialist world of the future. Dostoevsky thus stresses, as he had already done with Alyosha Karamazov, the similarity between his own ultimate aims and those of the Russian radicals. But for him, this aim had now become identified with “the establishment of the universal church on earth, insofar as the earth is capable of containing it”; and he believed that such an aim was shared, even if only inchoately and unconsciously, by the vast multitude of the Russian peasantry (27: 18–19).

  The people trust only in God and the tsar, and for Dostoevsky the first step toward relieving their malaise is to sweep away everything that stands between them and their revered ruler. “Summon the gray peasant coats,” he admonishes, “and ask them what they lack and what they need and they will tell the truth, and all of us, for the first time perhaps, will hear the real truth!” (27: 21). Today we can hardly imagine just how daring such a Populist suggestion was in a totally despotic state, all of whose policy and decisions were determined in secret by the tsar and his advisers, and in which the democratic notion of consulting the people was considered nothing less than lèse-majesté. Nor was Dostoevsky suggesting what the Russians call a zemsky sobor, an assembly of all classes in the land, which had been convoked during the Time of Troubles and established the Romanov family as the ruling house. No, only the peasantry should be consulted. “[A]nd we, ‘the people’s intelligentsia,’ shall stand meekly aside for the moment and at first merely look on while they speak and we listen” (27: 24). Dostoevsky expla
ins that he is asking the intelligentsia to step aside not for “political” but for pedagogical reasons. This image of the people was either scornfully dismissed, or more charitably regarded as just another flight of Dostoevsky’s artistic-poetic imagination.

  Dostoevsky concludes this issue of the Diary with reflections on Russian foreign policy, prompted by the advance of a Russian expeditionary force into Central Asia. The liberal St. Petersburg journals were highly critical of this imperialist adventure, particularly in view of the financial difficulties with which the country was struggling. Dostoevsky took up the cudgels not only to praise the victorious General Skobelev and his troops, but also to expound again the thematic leitmotif of this first issue—Russia was not Europe, and hence should not determine its foreign policy with European interests and concerns in mind.

  For Dostoevsky, the spread of Russian power in Central Asia will shake the prestige of England and convince all the peoples “up to the very borders of India . . . of the invincibility of the white Tsar and the omnipotence of his sword” (27: 32). The time is now ripe for Russia to think of Asia, which could play the same role for it as the discovery of America had done for Europe. All of Russia would be rejuvenated by this acquisition, the country would free itself from its inertia and sense of dependence on Europe, and a brave new world would come to birth. “In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, while in Asia we shall be the masters.” Like other advocates of imperialism, Dostoevsky argues that Russia will perform “a civilizing mission” in Asia, but he is perhaps more straightforward in pointing to all the riches that could be exploited—“the metals, the minerals, the countless coal fields.” And Asiatic expansion would also revitalize the Russians themselves. “Our mission will elevate our spirits, it will help give us dignity and self-awareness” (27: 36–37).