An erudite revolutionary, Chernyshevsky coined the phrase “the worse, the better”—the worse the hardships and grinding poverty of the peasantry, the better were the prospects for socialist revolution. When it came to the serf question, for instance, Chernyshevsky advocated emancipation without land, resulting in “an immediate catastrophe” for the peasants and an instant crisis for the state.12
Like Herzen, Chernyshevsky railed against the tsarist autocracy through his influential journal, Sovremennik (The Contemporary), which was read widely among Russia’s intelligentsia. Instead of writing from the safety of London, though, he worked in the Russian capital, within easy reach of the tsarist authorities. In 1862, Chernyshevsky was arrested on suspicions of subversion and tossed into solitary confinement in St. Petersburg’s island bastille—the famous Peter and Paul Fortress in the middle of the Neva River. The prison authorities saw no problem in granting his seemingly innocuous request for pen and paper to write a novel, and in four months, Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? was done.13
Perhaps “the worse, the better” described not only Chernyshevsky’s political philosophy but his literary merits as well, for the book has been universally panned—there is no real plotline or tension, and the environment and characters are stagnant. It has been called the worst novel ever written. Chernyshevsky himself even admitted that his novel contains neither talent nor art, but only “truth.”14 Even Alexander Herzen, reading it years later, described it as an artistic failure: “What a worthless generation whose aesthetics are satisfied by this,” he wrote. “The ideas are beautiful, even the situations—and all this is poured from a seminarian-Petersburg-bourgeois urinal.”15
On the surface, What Is to Be Done? is a stumbling narrative of a group of young Russians: the sympathetic Vera Pavlovna defies an arranged marriage to a man of wealth and power to elope with a young medical student, Dmitry Lopukhov. Once freed from the patriarchal “tyranny” of the traditional Russian family, they adhere to strict equality between the sexes. Vera then falls for Lopukhov’s best friend, Kirsanov. True to his egalitarian principles, Lopukhov does not object and even fakes his own suicide so that Vera can marry Kirsanov, start a sewing commune, and secretly yearn for an even more bizarrely ascetic revolutionary, Rakhmetov. The end. That’s it.
The prison censor—apparently a less-than-sapient reader—leafed through the pages of Chernyshevsky’s dime-store romance, deemed it publishable, and turned it over to Sovremennik’s interim editor, who promptly lost the manuscript on a cab ride through the capital. Panicked, the editor took out an advertisement in St. Petersburg’s police newspaper pleading for its return, and in what must be the most incredible case of authoritarian-bureaucratic bungling, it was the detested tsarist police that not only found but also returned the most subversive, anti-government novel in Russian history.16
The first installment of What Is to Be Done? appeared in Sovremennik in 1863 and was a smash hit. One revolutionary fan claimed there had been “only three great men in history: Jesus Christ, St. Paul and Chernyshevsky.” Georgy Plekhanov—founder of the social-democratic movement in Russia—asked “Who has not read and reread this famous work?” From his exile in London, the German Karl Marx taught himself Russian just to read the works of this “great Russian scholar and critic.”17 High praise indeed.
“It had become the kind of book people who had given up all their other possession kept strapped to the inside of their peasant tunic,” explained one literary historian. Literary critics of Chernyshevsky’s day were baffled by the overwhelming popularity of such an awful book. They simply didn’t understand: “it wasn’t that the Chernyshevsky fans had bad taste in writing; it was that they didn’t care about writing. What they cared about was thinking, and thinking was what Vera Pavlovna and Chernyshevsky gave them.”18
The novel passed the censor only because these subversive ideas were tucked away between the lines and gobbled up by an audience only too willing to crack the Chernyshevsky code. The “rational” relations between Vera Pavlovna and her husbands—as well as the agitation for female education—has been read as a women’s-rights attack on the traditional order. Yet that attack is doubly reinforced by Chernyshevsky’s frequent reference to the role of alcohol in that old order.
Frankly, Chernyshevsky took less time to address Russian drunkenness in What Is to Be Done? than I do in this book—which is saying something. Piecing together a mysterious shooting in the opening scene, the police’s first hypotheses are either a drunken murder or a drunken suicide—alcohol naturally being the most likely culprit for any violent crime. Later, futilely trying to come to terms with a woman as progressive and assertive as Vera, many characters representing the “old” traditional order simply dismissed her as a drunk.19
Strangely, generations of literary critics hardly notice that the entire story is swimming in vodka. From the auspicious decanter of vodka in the cupboard of Vera Pavlovna’s childhood home to her parents’ chronic alcoholism, every mention of liquor is shorthand for the degeneracy of the old order. “You should never believe anything I say when I’m drunk,” Vera’s mother stammers, revealing her true colors. “Do you hear? Don’t believe a word of it!”20 Her “boorish” father offers all manner of alcohol to his guests, even lauding vodka’s medicinal benefits. Of course, Vera’s father was not simply a bureaucrat, but one who “was in the habit of loaning money on pawn of personal property,” just as the despised tavern keepers.21
All of the novel’s heroes come to terms with their own alcoholism as part of their ascetic preparations for the coming revolution. When it comes to Lopukhov, we learn “there’s rarely been a man who has abstained for so long,” not only from alcohol but also sexual promiscuity. Earlier, though, he was an alcoholic who drank even “when he had no money for tea and sometimes none for boots.” Even here, the blame clearly lies with the system. “His drinking came about as a consequence of depression over his intolerable poverty,” wrote Chernyshevsky, “and nothing more.”22
“In my day we used to drink a good deal,” Lopukhov himself replies to his host’s hospitality. “I drank enough to last a long time. When I had no luck and no money, I used to get drunk; but now I have enough to do, and enough money, I don’t need wine. I feel gay enough without it.”23 In unassuming exchanges such as these, Chernyshevsky conveys his fundamental position on the liquor question, which he fully articulated in a series of penetrating articles on the Russian vodka trade in Sovremennik in 1858–59.
SOVIET-ERA STAMP COMMEMORATING NIKOLAI CHERNYSHEVSKY (1828–1889)
Writing as L. Pankratev—his well-known nom de plume for economic issues—Chernyshevsky loudly proclaimed that the peasantry’s slavery to the bottle would end only after they could afford food, clothing, and adequate housing. The outmoded tax farm was the focus of his most stinging criticism. “From the tax farm comes all of life’s miseries: both poverty and debauchery have taken hold of a great part of the population, and the consequences of poverty and debauchery are our ignorance, our moral impotence, and our inability to comprehend our own human dignity.” Never one to mince words, Chernyshevsky blasted: “the vodka tax farm is the single greatest evil in our lives, and only with the elimination of this evil will we thrive and prosper.”24
Ever the sapient observer, Chernyshevsky made the now-familiar argument that the state’s harnessing of vodka’s tremendous profitability not only debauched the Russian people but also sacrificed Russia’s rich brewing and wine-making trades. Abolishing the vodka tax farm would benefit not only the peoples’ health and morality but Russian agriculture, viniculture, and brewing as well.25
Chernyshevsky fingered everyone in the vodka administration. The tax farmer?—more like a savage Chechen warlord: mercilessly raiding the Russian people. The tavern keeper? “Not even the great American showman P. T. Barnum can match the ingenuity of the tavern-keeper when it comes to luring-in visitors”—and once inside, the tselovalnik would take everything.26
According to
Chernyshevsky, even “the most simple, uneducated person” understood that the entire system was antithetical to the proper, moral relationship between the government and society. Indeed, he may have provided the most succinct summary of Russia’s vodka politics.
For the government, money is not the ultimate goal, it is only a means to achieve other goals, such as increasing its might among foreign powers, achieving glory, consolidating its notorious political system, and developing public institutions to maintain the legal and administrative system. The state’s cash needs come from these goals, and is subordinate to them. But by its very nature, the state’s interest extends beyond simple financial conditions: in its operations there is always another, more moral side, promoting national honor, the moral welfare of the nation, justice and fairness. The tax farm is by its nature completely alien to all such considerations. The only reason for its existence is monetary; its sole purpose and concern is money, money, money.27
Chernyshevsky used international comparisons to underscore Russia’s drinking problems. Nowhere else in Europe, he argues, do doctors have to confront zapoi—the multiday benders stemming from the traditional Muscovite drinking culture (see chapter 7), which often culminate in alcohol poisoning.28 The closest European parallel, he claims, is Father Mathew’s hard-drinking Irish: exploited and impoverished by a corrupt system of foreign British domination. Yet once the “ignorant, dirty, and lazy Patrick” leaves the British yoke and immigrates to New York, he finds an impartial and just system where his hard-earned money is no longer appropriated by a shiftless landlord. Within years, Chernyshevsky argues, Patrick is reborn as hardworking, sober, and thrifty, “proving” that only by improving social conditions—along with abolishing the state’s oppressive vodka farm—will the Russian nation flourish.29
Perhaps Chernyshevsky’s characterization of Irish-Americans may have slightly missed the mark. Still, he effectively and consistently used vodka to highlight the shortcomings in Russia’s autocracy. Back in Chernyshevsky’s awful What Is to Be Done? Anastasia Borisovna describes how she was a drunken floozie before being “reborn” as a good socialist thanks to the virtuous Kirsanov.
I stretched out on his sofa, and said: “Nu, where is your wine?” “No,” says he, “I shall give you no wine; but you can have tea, if you want.” “With whiskey,” I said. “No, without whiskey.” I began to do all sorts of foolish things, to be utterly shameless. He sat down and looked at me; but he did not show any interest, so offensive was it to him. Nowadays you can find such young men, Vera Pavlovna; since that time young men have been growing morally better, but then it was a very rare thing.30
The distinction between the mindless inebriety of old Russia and the ideal of an enlightened, abstinent generation could hardly be more stark. But in case it is not, Anastasia continues to tell how the young medical student diagnosed her condition.
“You must not drink at all; you have very weak [chest].”
“A kak zhe nam ne pit’?—How could we not drink? Anastasia asks. “nam bez etogo nel’zya—We cannot exist without it.”
“Then you must give up the life that you are leading,” prescribes Kirsanov.
“Why should I give it up? Ved’ ona veselaya!—It’s such a joyous life.”
“No,” replies Kirsanov, “malo vesel’ya—there’s little joy in it.”31
Here Chernyshevsky explicitly invokes the legend of Prince Vladimir of Kiev who—as described in chapter 7—allegedly chose Orthodox Christianity for the Russian people over the abstinence of Islam with his pronouncement that “drinking is the joy [vesel’e] of the Rus’, we cannot exist without it.”32 Why else would Anastasia twice answer in the plural “we” to such a question about her personal drinking habits? Against this well-known adage, the lesson is crystal clear: it is not simply Anastasia who must give up the drunkard’s lifestyle—it is the entire Russian nation.
Thus when it comes to vodka politics, if there was indeed an answer to the not-so-rhetorical titular question What Is to Be Done? Chernyshevsky surely suggested abolishing the vodka tax farm as the the only way to liberate the Russian people from drunkenness and corruption. This, of course, would require nothing less than the overthrow of the entire feudal structure of Russian autocracy.
And to think that the poor imperial censor missed all of that.
Such embarrassing public unmasking of vodka politics could—and did—get you thrown in jail on vague charges of sedition. After two years of solitary confinement while the authorities sought in vain for damning evidence against him, in 1864, a secret senate tribunal found Chernyshevsky guilty and sentenced him to civil execution, “for criminal intent to overthrow the existing order.”33 Chernyshevsky knelt in a cold downpour as a wooden sword was broken over his head, symbolizing his civil degradation, before being sent to a Siberian penal colony in leg irons. Twenty-five years later, broken physically and mentally, Chernyshevsky was finally allowed to return home to Saratov, to die. His martyrdom at the hands of the tsarist autocracy enshrined Chernyshevsky as a veritable saint of the Russian intelligentsia. Yet perhaps the crowning irony is that generations of his disciples sang his praises in—of all things—a popular drinking song:
Let’s drink to the author of
What Is to Be Done?
To his heroes and his ideals.34
Decoding The Classics
While it would be a stretch to count Chernyshevsky among Russia’s greatest novelists, in the wake of What Is to Be Done? many world-famous works of Russian literature shared a common theme—using alcoholism to slam the autocracy itself.
Consider Chernyshevsky’s better-remembered contemporary, Dostoevsky. Although the two writers ran in the same St. Petersburg circles, their politics could not have been more distant. In the spring of 1862 aspiring young Marxists rocked the capital in a wave of revolutionary agitation, arson, and violence. The police arrested and accused Chernyshevsky as their ideological ringleader, but days before facing the authorities, he confronted an irate Dostoevsky, who had found a leaflet calling for “bloody and pitiless revolution.” In their meeting, Dostoevsky implored Chernyshevsky to halt such “abominations.” Satisfied, Dostoevsky later wrote that he had “never met a kinder and more cordial person” than Chernyshevsky. Meanwhile, Chernyshevsky described Dostoevsky as a deranged lunatic and would say anything simply to appease him.35
Either in person or in print, the two never saw eye-to-eye, as almost everything Dostoevsky subsequently wrote lampooned Chernyshevsky’s ideas.36 Yet while generations of experts debate whether Dostoevsky’s existentialism and anti-nihilistic symbolism directly refute Chernyshevsky’s enlightened rational materialism and economic determinism, both consistently used alcohol as a symbol of the decrepit autocratic system.
Take, for instance, Dostoevsky’s famed Crime and Punishment, written in 1865, one year after Chernyshevsky’s mock execution and banishment. It tells of Raskolnikov, an impoverished intellectual who, in the name of the greater social good, butchers the crusty old pawnbroker to whom he is indebted with a hatchet before being betrayed by his own conscience. We’re told that Raskolnikov was hardly a drunk, but as soon as the thought enters his mind to murder the old woman he staggers “like a drunken man” into a nearby tavern for a few rounds of beer to clear his head. There he meets Marmeladov, a hopelessly irredeemable drunkard, whose inebriety caused him to sell his own daughter into prostitution.37
Indeed, as critics have noted, alcoholism “runs like a red thread throughout the novel.” Marmeladov is only the first noteworthy drunkard. Both the rural village setting of Raskolnikov’s horse-beating dream and the dingy urban thoroughfares of St. Petersburg are littered with drunkards, young and old, male and female. Raskolnikov is often mistaken for a drunk, and he frequently meets friends in taverns, where they get him “to drink like a pig.” By contrast, the diligent police investigator Porfiry Petrovich makes a point of noting that he does not drink at all. Even the most positive male character in the story, Razumikhin (whose
name in Russian connotes level-headed reason), is a heavy drinker: stumbling drunk when he meets his friend’s family and downing bottles of beer even while caring for his sick friend, Raskolnikov. To repeat a now-familiar theme, Dostoevsky stresses how Razumikhin was “extremely worried by the fact that… while drunk, he let out to Raskolnikov that he was suspected of the murder.”38
As in What Is to Be Done? Dostoevsky’s allusions to drunkenness are understandable against not only the backdrop of mass inebriation but also the ongoing public debates in the “thick journals” over alcohol, poverty, and disease. Herzen’s Kolokol, Chernyshevsky’s Soveremmenik, and even Dostoevsky’s Vremya (Time) sparred over various proposals to address the liquor problem, the appropriateness of the state’s involvement in the liquor trade, and the morality of basing the economic well-being of the state on the degradation of its people.39
While millions have been engrossed by Dostoevsky’s morose exposition on murder and human psychology, most might be surprised that this was not the original intent behind Crime and Punishment—nor was that the original title. With his gambling debts piling up, in June 1865, Dostoevsky wrote to the editor Andrei Krayevsky asking for an advance of three thousand rubles for this proposed work. His letter reads: “My novel is called ‘The Drunkards’ and it will be connected with the current problem of drunkenness. Not only is the problem examined, but all of its ramifications are represented, most of all depictions of families, the bringing up of children under these circumstances, and so on.”40 Apparently, this idea didn’t fly, so Dostoevsky folded The Drunkards into Crime and Punishment by way of the tragedies of Marmeladov and his family.
Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State Page 20