Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Meanwhile, however, others had heard of the Dostoevskys’ difficulties, and an important editor and publisher, prompted by the wife of a general, approached Metropolitan Isidor of the Alexander Nevsky lavra (a religious compound containing a cemetery) to suggest that it would be fitting for Dostoevsky to be buried there free of charge. Their request was met with a flat refusal: the worthy and learned metropolitan said that he was nothing but “a simple novelist, who never wrote anything serious,” and that in addition his funeral might cause a “disorder undesirable within the walls of the lavra.”39 When Pobedonostsev, now the highest secular official in charge of the Russian Church, heard of this retort at the evening panikhida, he responded, “We will allocate the money for the burial of Dostoevsky.” Metropolitan Isidor was no doubt read a thorough lesson in private, and the next day the newspapers announced that the place of burial would be the Alexander Nevsky lavra.

  At the evening panikhida, the cramped apartment of the Dostoevskys was even more filled to overflowing; a newspaper correspondent wrote that those arriving at eight could not reach the coffin until at least ten. Saltykov-Shchedrin was there, and so was Countess Komarovskaya, accompanied by Baroness Feleisen. In a letter to Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, the countess described how the two titled ladies were unable to approach the coffin all through the service—no doubt a new experience for those before whom everyone made way. When the countess finally saw Dostoevsky, she too was struck by his expression: “As if alive, a bright, peaceful face . . . like a man who has done his duty, borne everything, not at all embittered.” The children were busy around the coffin, lighting candles that had been snuffed out by the lack of air and “asking visitors not to kiss the forehead [of the corpse] but the icon.”40

  Ever since his return from Siberia in 1860, Dostoevsky had dreamed of uniting Russian society into one harmonious whole linked by faith and love. The closest this sublime chimera ever came to being realized was during the days when his body lay in its bier. All—literally all—of those who made up the cultural-political life of St. Petersburg, the nerve center of the Russian Empire, came to pay him homage. Saltykov-Shchedrin rubbed elbows with Countess Komarovskaya; Mikhailovsky, who had just begun to write under a pseudonym for the underground newspaper of the terrorist People’s Will, found himself in the same rooms with Pobedonostsev and Grand Duke Dimitry, who was there accompanied by his tutor. Contemporaries themselves could not help marveling at the unanimity of grief and of reverence suddenly exhibited by all sections of a society otherwise torn apart by unceasing conflict—a conflict that, just a month later, would culminate in the assassination of Alexander II. Anna later remarked that, if her husband had not died on January 28, he would have had only a month longer to live—the news about Alexander would certainly have brought on an arterial rupture.

  It is not surprising that those who had known him personally, or had taken part either for or against him in the literary polemics of the day, should have felt it obligatory to participate in the funeral ceremonies. More remarkable is the astonishingly widespread response that the news of his death aroused in the community at large, especially among the student youth. Koni recalls one of his young lawyers, whom he had asked to read a legal brief aloud, hesitating and stumbling while doing so. When asked if he were ill, he blurted out the news (which Koni had not yet heard) that Dostoevsky was dead, and then dissolved into tears.41 As the word spread in the gymnasiums and the schools of higher learning in the capital, groups immediately began to organize, to assign delegates to attend the panikhida, and to collect funds to buy wreaths so that they could participate en masse in the burial ceremonies.

  Dostoevsky’s appeal to the student youth was never more apparent than on this final occasion. I. F. Tyumenev, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, has left a classic account of the funeral and the procession in which he and his comrades took part. He remarked that if Turgenev, Goncharov, or Ostrovsky had died, their loss would not have been as “painful” as that of Dostoevsky, “who had just begun to attract the attention of society, just begun to interest everyone with his ‘Karamazovs,’ and just getting ready to continue narrating the fate of Alyosha, this (according to his intention) new Russian evangelical Socialist.”42 Tyumenev is obviously in sympathy with what he accurately calls Alyosha’s “evangelical Socialism,” and he also speaks as if his work had just come to public attention and gained a widespread readership. Although far from being true, this error helps us to understand why a new generation had become so receptive to his influence; they had grown up absorbing Populist (not Nihilist) ideas, and thus would not turn away from the Christian implications of Dostoevsky’s moral ideal. The remainder of this entry describes the instantaneous decision of the students in the academy to collect funds. When those assigned to the task were met occasionally by the question, “And who is this Dostoevsky?” no answer was given; some of the collectors even spat to show their contempt for such ignorance.

  On the afternoon of January 30, the head of the censorship, N. S. Abaza, presented Anna with a letter from the Ministry of Finance informing her that the tsar had deigned to grant her a lifetime pension of two thousand rubles a year “because of [her husband’s] services to Russian literature.”43 This was, apparently, the first pension of its kind ever awarded in Russia to a writer as such. (Those given to Pushkin and Karamzin, who had occupied official government positions as sinecures, were for their services to the state.) Two vacancies, one in the prestigious Corps of Pages and the other in the Smolny Institute (a school for daughters of the nobility), also were to be reserved for the Dostoevsky children, and while Anna accepted all these offers gratefully, she later sent both children to other educational institutions.

  Meanwhile, on the evening of the same day, Grigorovich made a list of all the groups who wanted to march in the funeral procession and established an order of the places where the delegates should assemble. The student representatives were told to help maintain order; older Dostoevsky friends were also appointed to oversee various groupings. The procession would begin at 10:30 the next morning (it started at 11:00) and proceed from the apartment to the Alexander Nevsky lavra along the Nevsky Prospect.

  January 31, a Saturday, dawned bright and clear. The Diary of a Writer appeared on that very day. A numberless crowd had gathered around the apartment at Kuznechny Alley by nine o’clock that morning, all bearing wreaths and banners inscribed with the names of their institutions and societies, including journals and newspapers. A count made came to sixty-seven such groups, with fifteen choirs accompanying the cortège. Tyumenev described the moment when the coffin emerged from the house and appeared to the crowd. “From the belfry of the Vladimirsky church sounded the bell, and just right after the first impact a solemn ‘Holy God’ rang out. . . . At the first sound of the prayer all heads were bared . . . and to many of us, sobs rose in our throats. At that moment everyone, whether believer or not, felt something like the breath of godliness.”44 The procession wound its way through the streets, the coffin being carried by alternating bearers; among the first were Dostoevsky’s surviving fellow Petrashevtsy, A. I. Palm and A. N. Pleshcheev. They were followed by mourners stretching for almost a mile, with banners and wreaths. “It can boldly be said,” wrote Strakhov, “that, up until then, there had never before been such a funeral in Russia.”45

  Observers were struck by the orderliness of the crowd. The police kept their distance, except for one episode not reported in the newspapers but appearing in two private memoirs. One delegation of women students, instead of a wreath, displayed a pair of the convict shackles that Dostoevsky had worn and about which he had written in House of the Dead. When the police came to appropriate them, they were surrendered peacefully so as not to disturb the solemnity of the occasion. Dostoevsky’s prison past was one of his badges of honor, and when an elderly passer-by asked a member of the delegation who was receiving such a majestic funeral, the answer came back, “A katorzhnik” (an exiled convict). The mass of the popula
tion assumed that such an imposing cortège must be that of some important general.

  It took two hours for the coffin to reach the portals of the Alexander Nevsky lavra, where it was met at the gateway by the students of the Theological Seminary and the clergy in their ceremonial robes. The clergy were led by the head of the lavra, Archimandrite Simeon, and the rector of the Theological Seminary, Dostoevsky’s old friend Father Yanishev. After the coffin was carried into the Church of the Holy Spirit within the lavra, the doors of the entry were closed and only delegations with wreaths were admitted. The crowd was told that the church would hold at most fifteen hundred mourners, and the procession began to disperse until about four the next day, when the burial would take place. At eight o’clock that evening the night service for the dead began, attended by Anna and the children (Lyubov had almost been crushed in the crowd around the gates earlier in the day). “The church,” Anna wrote, “was filled with those in prayer; many were . . . students of various higher educational institutions, the Theological Academy and kursistki. The majority of them stayed in the church for the entire night, relaying each other in reading the psalms over Dostoevsky’s coffin.”46

  On February 1, the day of the burial, a second edition of the Diary was published, its first page rimmed with a black border. At ten o’clock, a mass was performed in the church in the presence of Pobedonostsev and other high officials of the government, and this was followed by the otpevanie, the service for the dead. Father Yanishev then spoke a few words about his friend, all of whose work as a novelist, he said quite acutely, was an echo of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. The coffin, which remained closed on Pobedonostsev’s order so as to spare Anna and the children, was then carried to a plot in the cemetery adjoining the grave of the poet Zhukovsky. Lyubov gave a heartrending cry, which moved all those present to their depths when she exclaimed: “Good-bye [proshchai, which can also mean forgive], dear, kind, good papa, good-bye.”47 Various people spoke at the grave, and Popov, who climbed a tree to get a better view above the crowd, recalled “the apostolic figure of V. S. Solovyev [with his] curls falling on his forehead,” “who spoke with great pathos and expressiveness.”48

  Let us end with some of Solovyev’s words, ones not spoken at the grave site but days earlier (January 30) in the lectures he was giving both at the University of St. Petersburg and at the Bestuzhev Higher Courses for Women, whose students were among Dostoevsky’s most fervent admirers. To the first, he said, “last year, at the Pushkin festival, Dostoevsky called Pushkin a prophet, but Dostoevsky himself deserves this title to an even greater degree.” To the female students, he declared: “Just as the highest worldly power somehow or other becomes concentrated in one person, who represents a state, similarly the highest spiritual power in each epoch usually belongs in every people to one man, who more clearly than all grasps the spiritual ideals of mankind, more consciously than all strives to attain them, more strongly than all affects others by his preachments. Such a spiritual leader of the Russian people in recent times was Dostoevsky.”49

  1 DVS, 2: 475.

  2 Letopis zhizni i tvorchestvo F. M. Dostoevskogo, ed. N. F. Budanova and G. M. Fridlender, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1995), 3: 503.

  3 PSS, 28/Bk. 1: 176; February 20, 1854.

  4 Ibid., 30/Bk. 1: 232; December 3, 1880.

  5 Ibid., 232–233.

  6 Letopis, 3: 513.

  7 Cited in G. M. Fridlender, “D. S. Merezhkovsky i Dostoevsky,” in Dostoevsky—materialy i issledovaniya, vol. 10 (St. Petersburg, 1992), 4.

  8 DVS, 2: 363–364.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Letopis, 3: 529.

  11 Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 341.

  12 DVS, 2: 195.

  13 Cited in I. Volgin, Posledny god Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1986), 387.

  14 Letopis, 3: 526–527.

  15 DVS, 2: 469–470.

  16 Letopis, 3: 536.

  17 Ibid., 3: 535–536; DVS, 2: 473.

  18 Letopis, 3: 539.

  19 Volgin, Posledny god Dostoevskogo, 414. My chapter on Dostoevsky’s last days is greatly indebted to Volgin’s book.

  20 Ibid., 416–418.

  21 Ibid.

  22 See Victor Shklovsky, Za i protiv (Moscow, 1957), 254–255. Even though the official documents give the number of Barannikov’s apartment as 11, Shklovsky continues to maintain, without offering evidence, that the number was changed in the official documents.

  23 Volgin, Posledny god Dostoevskogo, 436.

  24 Letopis, 3: 543.

  25 Volgin, Posledny god Dostoevskogo, 420.

  26 PSS, 30/Bk. 1: 242–243; January 28, 1881.

  27 Reminiscences, 345–346.

  28 Ibid.

  29 Ibid., 346.

  30 Volgin, Posledny god, 422.

  31 Letopis, 3: 545–546.

  32 Reminiscences, 348.

  33 Volgin, Posledny god, 429–430.

  34 Reminiscences, 351.

  35 Letopis, 3: 547–548.

  36 Reminiscences, 352.

  37 Ibid.

  38 Letopis, 3: 550.

  39 Ibid., 551.

  40 Ibid.

  41 DVS, 2: 246.

  42 Ibid., 479.

  43 Letopis, 3: 554.

  44 DVS, 2: 480.

  45 Cited in Volgin, Posledny god, 495.

  46 Reminiscences, 359.

  47 Letopis, 3: 561.

  48 DVS, 2: 478.

  49 Letopis, 3: 548, 553.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  I was delighted when Joseph Frank asked if I would compose the one-volume edition of his monumental five-volume work on Dostoevsky. As I reread the volumes to formulate some principles for editing, it became clear that the rich detail (of biography, literary culture, ideology) is employed in a singular manner—namely, to bring out the full power of Dostoevsky’s work. All of the stories and novels are then analyzed, as literary texts, in separate, self-contained chapters. Frank doesn’t analyze the literary work as a window into Dostoevsky’s life and times, quite the reverse; and what he achieves in the process is a literary criticism that gives the reader the most intense and clearest possible impression of the fiction.

  My aim as I set to work was to maintain that brilliant balance of biography, literary criticism, and intellectual history that Joseph Frank originated; and to keep as well the “novelistic” narrative style so appropriate to the life of Dostoevsky. The challenge was to do this while cutting nearly two-thirds of the original material. I therefore went through several editing rounds carefully, cutting more each round, summarizing more each round, reorganizing or rewriting passages as needed for narrative cohesion. I frequently combined two, three, or even four chapters of the original volumes into one chapter. For the major novels, I maintained a separate chapter or chapters for the analysis of the literary text, as in the original volumes, though condensing as necessary. For some of the early minor works, however, I was forced to weave Frank’s analysis of the literary text into the narrative; and I did this by cutting much of the plot summary and focusing on the key ideas of the work and its significance for Dostoevsky’s development as a writer, or for the development of important themes in Dostoevsky’s greatest novels. Despite the cuts, the essential material of the original is preserved.

  My warmest thanks to Robin Feuer Miller for reading the first draft of the condensation side by side with the original and for her suggestions for restoring text; to Joseph Frank for his meticulous review of the condensation in its final stages; and to Hanne Winarsky, whose idea it was to bring out this edition, for her generous and steadfast support.

  Mary Petrusewicz is an independent scholar, writer, and translator who lectures in Russian literature and history at Stanford University.

  INDEX

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in th
e print index are listed below

  Abaza, N. S.

  Abaza, Yulia

  Abrams, M. H.

  Academy of Military Engineers

  accusatory literature

  Acta Martyrum

  aesthetics. See beauty

  afterlife. See immortality of the soul

  agit-prop literature

  Akhsharumov, D. D.

  Aksakov, Ivan

  Aksakov, Konstantin

  Aksakov, S. T.

  Alchevskaya, Khristina

  Alexander I, tsar

  Alexander II, tsar: assassination attempts on

  assassination of

  The Citizen and

  era of proclamations and

  FMD’s anniversary address to

  FMD’s ideas about tsarism and

  FMD’s relationship with royal family

  liberation of the serfs and

  Nechaev and

  and peace with Turkey

  reforms of

  revolutionary leaflets and

  Alexander, tsarevich (later Alexander III):

  FMD presents Diary of a Writer to

  FMD presents The Brothers Karamazov to

  and financial assistance to FMD

  Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke

  Alexandrov, Mikhail

  alter ego. See quasi-double

  Ambrose, Father

  Annenkov, P. V.: as chronicler