Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Perhaps this aspect of Scott struck him so forcibly because it helped him accept his own familial situation with more equanimity. The budding consciousness of the youthful Dostoevsky may have vibrated to Scott’s glorification of patriarchal relations between ruler and ruled as the surest anchor of social stability. If so, this is exactly the relation between the tsar-father and his “children”—his subjects—that Dostoevsky will later convince himself existed in Russia, and which served as a bulwark, in his view, against the disintegrating individualism of European society. He came to believe that the protection of this “feeling” was a necessary “condition for the preservation of mankind.” And if The Brothers Karamazov, after King Lear, is the greatest work ever written to illustrate the moral horrors that ensue when family bonds disintegrate, it is partly because Dostoevsky had been mulling over this theme all his life.

  Dr. Dostoevsky was a subscriber to the new periodical, The Library for Reading (Biblioteka dlya chteniya), and it was probably in these pages that Dostoevsky first became aware of such writers as Victor Hugo, Balzac, and George Sand, who were soon to play so important a part in his spiritual and literary evolution. At the same time, Dostoevsky was also receiving his first important exposure to German Idealist and Romantic ideas in the classroom. His professor of literature during his senior year was I. I. Davydov, one of the small group of academics responsible for propagating Schelling’s ideas in Russia. He thoroughly indoctrinated Dostoevsky with the whole tradition of German Romantic Idealist art and aesthetics that dominated Russian culture in the 1830s.

  What affected Dostoevsky most profoundly was Schelling’s view of art as an organ of metaphysical cognition—indeed, as the vehicle through which the mysteries of the highest transcendental truths are revealed to mankind. The entire generation of the 1840s became imbued with this belief in the exalted metaphysical mission of art; and no one was to defend it with more passion and brilliance than Dostoevsky. As we shall see, Dostoevsky was also influenced by Schelling’s view that the highest truths were closed to discursive reason but accessible by a superior faculty of “intellectual intuition,” as well as by his Idealist conception of nature as dynamic rather than static and mechanical—or, in other words, as exhibiting a spiritual meaning and purpose. Such ideas must have seemed to the young Dostoevsky a welcome confirmation, offered by the most up-to-date science and philosophy, of the religious convictions he had been taught as a child and had always accepted.

  Of even greater importance for Dostoevsky than all the influences we have mentioned so far, however, was that of Alexander Pushkin. Some of Pushkin’s prose was read in the family circle, but his reputation was as yet by no means established, and the juvenile enthusiasm of both Mikhail and Feodor for his work gives evidence of their serious literary propensities. Some of Pushkin’s greatest works appeared during Dostoevsky’s adolescence (“The Queen of Spades,” “Songs of the Western Slavs,” “The Covetous Knight,” “The Bronze Horseman,” “Egyptian Nights”), and, though greeted tepidly by the critics they were avidly read by the young Feodor.

  On hearing of Pushkin’s death in February 1837, Dostoevsky told the family that, if he were not already wearing mourning for his mother, he would have wished to do so for Pushkin. There is something impulsively right in this youthful desire; if it was his mother who had given birth to him in the flesh, it was Pushkin who had given birth to him in the world of the spirit. Pushkin dominates Dostoevsky’s literary life from beginning to end, and the great writer of his youth is also the one to whom he devoted his last public utterance. In the famous speech he gave at the dedication of a Pushkin monument in 1880—a speech that caused a national sensation—Dostoevsky interpreted Pushkin’s writing as the first (and still unsurpassed) utterance of Russia’s deepest moral-national values. Pushkin’s work provides the foundations and defines the horizon of Dostoevsky’s own creative universe.

  Dostoevsky read and reread Pushkin, meditated unceasingly on his works, and bequeathed to posterity a series of inspired interpretations of them that have permanently affected Russian criticism. Even more, Dostoevsky’s own writings are impossible to imagine without taking Pushkin into account as a predecessor. Leonid Grossman has well said that “His greatest figures are linked to Pushkin’s heroes, and often are manifestly deepenings of the original Pushkinian sketches that lift them to the level of tragic intensity.”31 The terrified clerks of the early stories could not have existed without “The Bronze Horseman” and “The Station Master”; Raskolnikov recreates the murderous folly of Pushkin’s Hermann in “The Queen of Spades,” who is equally obsessed with an idée fixe and equally ready to murder to obtain wealth and power; Stavrogin transforms the charming ne’er-do-well Evgeny Onegin into a terrifying demonic force. The theme of impostorship—so brilliantly dramatized in Boris Godunov, and so fateful and omnipresent in Russian history—also haunts Dostoevsky’s pages from first to last, beginning with The Double, taken up again in Demons, and culminating majestically in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.

  D. V. Grigorovich, who later became a novelist, was a fellow student with Dostoevsky at the Academy of Military Engineers. He remembers being impressed not only by Dostoevsky’s thorough knowledge of Pushkin’s works but also by the fact that only he, among all the other students, took Pushkin’s death to heart. It is clear that Dostoevsky was living emotionally in a world quite different from that inhabited by most of his comrades, whose heads were filled with more immediately practical concerns. At the age of sixteen, it is the disastrous fate of his literary idol, as well as all that Pushkin’s untimely death implied for Russian culture, that involves Dostoevsky’s deepest feelings. And if we are to understand him properly, we should keep in mind this precocious capacity to pour the full intensity of his private emotions into what was, essentially, a matter of cultural and national concern.

  1 Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgens, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 1: 42.

  2 Ibid., 2: 412.

  3 Ibid., 1: 42.

  4 DW (1873, no. 50), 152.

  5 Miller, Biografiya, 5–6.

  6 DVS, 1: 75.

  7 Ibid.

  8 A. P. Stanley, Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church (London, 1924), 303.

  9 DW (1873, no. 50), 152.

  10 Théophile Gautier, Voyage en Russie (Paris, n.d.), 276.

  11 Stanley, Lectures, 279.

  12 Ibid., 319.

  13 A. M. Dostoevsky, Vospominaniya (Leningrad, 1930), 48–49.

  14 DW (July–August 1877), 803.

  15 See George P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind (New York, 1960), chap. 4.

  16 A. Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, 3 vols. (New York, 1902), 3: 48.

  17 DVS, 1: 42–43.

  18 DW (April 1876), 284–285.

  19 DVS, 1: 61.

  20 Ibid.

  21 V. S. Nechaeva, V seme i usadbe Dostoevskikh (Moscow, 1939), 117–118; February 2, 1838.

  22 Ibid., 73; June 29, 1832.

  23 Ibid., 107; June 2, 1835.

  24 Pisma, 3: 177; June 10/22, 1875.

  25 In this interview, Kant also expounds on that human striving toward an ideal that Dostoevsky would vigorously uphold against the determinist and materialist tendency of his time: “Activity is man’s lot, He can never be completely content with that which he has, but is always striving to obtain something more. Death surprises us on the road toward something we still desire. Give a man everything he desires and yet at that very moment he will feel that this everything is not everything. Failing to see the aim or purpose of our striving in this life, we assume there is a future where the knot must be untied.” N. M. Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–1790, trans. and abridged by Florence Jonas (New York, 1957), 40–41.

  26 Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia (New York, 1966), 142.

  27 Pis’ma, 4: 196; August 18, 1880.

  28 For a useful summary of the material, s
ee Edmund K. Kostka, Schiller in Russian Literature (Philadelphia, 1965); chap. 7 is devoted to Dostoevsky. See also D. Chizhevsky, “Schiller v Rossii,” Novy Zhurnal 45 (1956), 109–135, and the spirited study by the Soviet Germanist N. Vilmont, “Dostoevsky i Schiller,” in his Velikie sputniki (Moscow, 1966), 7–316.

  29 DW (June 1876), 343.

  30 Pis’ma, 4: 196; August 18, 1880.

  31 Leonid Grossman, Biblioteka Dostoevskogo (Odessa, 1919), 70; for more details, see A. L. Bem, U istokov tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Prague, 1936), 37–123. Another good treatment is D. D. Blagoy, “Dostoevsky i Pushkin,” in Dostoevsky—khudoznik i myslitel’ (Moscow, 1972), 344–426.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Academy of Military Engineers

  The death of Marya Feodorovna snapped the strongest emotional thread tying the young Dostoevsky to Moscow; but the inner conflict between his desire to leave and the bleakness of the prospect ahead may account for the mysterious illness that struck him down just before his departure for the Academy of Military Engineers. Without any apparent cause, he lost his voice and seemed to have contracted some throat or chest ailment whose diagnosis was uncertain. The impending trip to St. Petersburg had to be postponed until finally Dr. Dostoevsky was advised to begin the journey and trust to the revivifying effects of travel. Andrey remarks that his brother’s voice, after that time, always retained a curious throaty quality that never appeared quite normal.

  The advice was sound, and Feodor’s illness passed away once the gates of Moscow were left behind. And no wonder! What Russian youth would not have felt a surge of strength and excitement at the prospect of going to St. Petersburg for the first time? For all young Russians, the journey was from past to present, from the city of monasteries and religious processions to that of severe government buildings and monstrous military parades, the journey to the spot where Peter the Great had broken “a window through to Europe.” It was also, for Mikhail and Feodor, the journey from boyhood to manhood, the end of the protected family world they had known and the beginning of the insecurities of independence.

  Years later, Dostoevsky wrote of this journey in The Diary of a Writer, evoking the state of mind in which both boys approached this new era in their lives. The brothers had their heads stuffed full of the mathematics that were necessary for their entrance examination into the academy, but both were secretly harboring literary ambitions. “We dreamt only of poetry and poets. My brother wrote verses, at least three poems a day even on the road, and I spent all my time composing in my head a novel of Venetian life.”1 The two young men planned immediately to visit the site of the duel in which Pushkin had been killed four months earlier and then “to see the room in which his soul expired.”2 Both were possessed by a mood of vague yearning and expectancy to which the mature Dostoevsky gives both a moral and a cultural significance. “My brother and I were then longing for a new life, we dreamt about something enormous, about everything ‘beautiful and sublime’; such touching words were then still fresh, and uttered without irony.”3

  3. A government courier on a mission

  It is against the background of this lofty moral idealism, so characteristic of the Russian culture of the 1830s, that one must gauge the shock of what then occurred. At a posting station along the road the Dostoevskys saw the whirlwind arrival of a government courier wearing the imposing full uniform of the time, crowned by the white, yellow, and green plumes of a three-cornered hat waving in the wind. The courier, a powerful and red-faced man, rushed into the station to drink a glass of vodka, emerged again rapidly, and leaped into a new troika. No sooner was he installed than he rose to his feet and began to beat the driver, a young peasant, on the back of the neck with his fist. The horses lurched forward as the driver frantically whipped them up, and the troika vanished from sight with the courier’s fist moving mechanically up and down in relentless rhythm as the whip rose and fell in a corresponding tempo.4 At the end of this account Dostoevsky imagines the young peasant, on returning to his village, beating his wife to revenge his own humiliation. “This sickening picture,” he says, “remained in my memory all my life.”5

  These words appeared in 1876, and in the notebooks for Crime and Punishment he jots down “My first personal insult, the horse, the courier,”6 thus confirming the primacy of the experience for Dostoevsky and the formative role that he assigns to it in his own self-development. For the courier became nothing less than a symbol of the brutal, oppressive government that he served—a government whose domination over an enslaved peasantry by naked force incited all the violence and harshness of peasant life. “Never was I able to forget the courier, and much that was shameful and cruel in the Russian people I was then inclined for a long while, and as it were involuntarily, to explain in an obviously much too one-sided fashion.”7 With these guarded phrases, Dostoevsky reveals the motivation of his radicalism of the 1840s, when nothing would obsess him more passionately than the issue of serfdom. “This little scene appeared to me, so to speak, as an emblem, as something very graphically demonstrating the link between cause and effect. Here every blow dealt to the animal leaped out of each blow dealt at the man. At the end of the 1840s, in the epoch of my most unrestrained and fervent dreams, it suddenly occurred to me that, if ever I were to found a philanthropic society [that is, radical or Socialist], I would without fail engrave this courier’s troika on the seal of the society as its emblem and sign.”8 Dostoevsky is telling his readers that, in his youth, he had explained the vices of the peasantry solely in social-political terms, solely as a result of the clenched fist crashing down on the back of their necks. He had been convinced that these vices would vanish once the fist had been stayed.

  It seems certain that the youth of sixteen had never observed such unimpassioned, systematic, and methodical brutality exercised on a perfectly blameless victim. The “official” nature of the inhumanity in this instance perhaps lit up in a flash the presumptive social source of the evil. And once again we note the capacity of his sensibility to be stirred at its deepest levels by a public and a social matter in which he was not personally involved at all.

  Critical clichés persist in viewing the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century as a solipsistic and introspective movement turning its back on the turbulent social-political problems of “real life.” The government of the time had quite a different opinion, as Benedetto Croce has pointed out. “The suffering of the world, the mystery of the universe, the impulse toward the sublime in love and heroism, the grief and despair over a dreamt-of but unattainable beatitude, the Hamlet-like visits to cemeteries, the romantic pallor, romantic beards, and romantic haircuts—all these and similar things gave evidence of restive spirits. It was expected and feared that they would join conspiratorial sects and rise with arms in their hands the moment they had the chance.”9 The young Dostoevsky was unquestionably a Romantic, but the impressions that he gleaned from literature reinforced and strengthened those offered by life. Dostoevsky would not have been so overcome by the beating of the peasant coachman if he had not read Karamzin and Pushkin, and had not already made his own some of Schiller’s moral ideal of “the beautiful and sublime.”

  This shocking episode with the coachman was Dostoevsky’s introduction to St. Petersburg and to all the sordid underside of the resplendent façade of the government in whose service he was about to enter. Indeed, his very first contact with officialdom brought him face-to-face with the hidden corruption that ran through all the institutions of Russian society. On arriving in St. Petersburg, Dr. Dostoevsky deposited his sons in a preparatory school, where the boys studied for their entrance examination into the academy. Even this important patronage, however, did not guarantee success. Mikhail was refused entrance on grounds of “ill health”; Feodor, though passing his exam brilliantly, did not receive one of the vacancies for entrance without payment of the admission fee. This had been promised when Dr. Dostoevsky had made application for his sons, but such places, it turned out, were reserved for those st
udents able to make “gifts” to the examiners. “What rottenness!” Dostoevsky indignantly writes his father. “We, who struggle for every last ruble, have to pay, while others—the sons of rich fathers—are accepted without fee.”10 Luckily, the Kumanins came to the rescue by supplying the required amount. Mikhail was finally admitted to another school of army engineers and was transferred to the Baltic provinces.

  From a purely worldly point of view, Dr. Dostoevsky had chosen well for his sons. The Academy of Military Engineers—housed in the imposing Mikhailovsky palace—was considered the finest establishment of its kind in Russia in the 1830s, and places in it were particularly sought because it enjoyed the patronage of Nicholas I. But Dostoevsky’s life in the academy was one long torture, and he always looked back on the decision to send him there as a woeful mistake. The error consisted not only in overlooking the real bent of his interests but also in placing him in a milieu dominated by physical violence, military harshness, and iron discipline rather than by the relaxed democratic camaraderie that Herzen depicts as reigning among his fellow students at the University of Moscow during the same years. “What examples I saw before me!” Dostoevsky reminisces twenty years later. “I saw children of thirteen already reckoning out their entire lives: where they could attain to what rank, what is more profitable, how to rake in cash (I was in the Engineers), and what was the fastest way to get a cushy, independent command!”11