Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  At the same time, the letter also expresses a sense of relief, as if a burden had been lifted off Dostoevsky’s shoulders. He tells Mikhail that now, more often than in the past, he is able to look on everything that surrounds him in the academy more calmly. He speaks openly for the first time about his intention to abandon the army. “My one goal is to be free. I am sacrificing everything for that. But often, often I think, what will freedom bring me? . . . what will I be, alone in the crowd of the unknowns?”29 Despite such nagging fears, Dostoevsky expresses confidence in himself and the future, and the firm conviction that his “sacred hopes” will one day be realized. Dostoevsky had never dared previously to acknowledge a defiance of his father’s wishes—a defiance that could only have led to a heartbreaking clash of wills. The death of his father had cleared this major emotional obstacle from his path, and his sense of guilt was thus also accompanied by a sense of liberation.

  It was, perhaps, an obscure awareness of some such feeling that now impels Dostoevsky to remark that his soul was “no longer accessible to its old stormy surges,” and that it was “like the heart of a man concealing a profound enigma.” Moreover, the aim of his life henceforth, he says, will be “to study ‘the meaning of life and man.’ ” Professing a qualified satisfaction with the progress he has already made in this enterprise, he adds the revealing information that he pursues it by delving into the “characters in the writers with whom the best part of my life is spent freely and joyously.” “Man is an enigma,” he continues, a few sentences later. “This enigma must be solved, and if you spend all your life at it, don’t say you have wasted your time; I occupy myself with this enigma because I wish to be a man.”30 It is no coincidence that these impressive words appear in the only letter commenting on the murder of his father. For no event could have driven home to him so intimately and starkly the enigma of human life—the enigma of the sudden irruption of irrational, uncontrollable, and destructive forces both within the world and in the human psyche; the enigma of the incalculable moral consequences even of such venial self-indulgence as his own demands on his father. It was this enigma that, indeed, he was to spend the rest of his life trying to solve; and no one can accuse him, while doing so, of having wasted his time.

  1 DW (January 1876), 184.

  2 Ibid., 185.

  3 Ibid., 184.

  4 Incidents of this kind were common in Dostoevsky’s time. The marquis de Custine, in his La Russie en 1839, describes a similar scene. “A little further on I saw a mounted courier, a feldjaeger or some other infamous employee of the government, get out of his carriage, run up to one of the two polite coachmen and strike him brutally with his whip, with a stick, with his fists.” Cited in George F. Kennan, The Marquis de Custine and His Russia in 1839 (Princeton, NJ, 1971), 28.

  5 DW (January 1876), 186.

  6 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment, ed. and trans. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago, 1967), 64.

  7 DW (January 1876), 186.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Benedetto Croce, Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono (Bari, 1953), 55.

  10 Pis’ma, 4: 236; February 4, 1838.

  11 Ibid., 4: 267.

  12 Ibid., 235.

  13 Ibid., 1: 46; August 9, 1838.

  14 DVS, 1: 106.

  15 Ibid., 127.

  16 Ibid., 97.

  17 Ibid., 99.

  18 Pis’ma, 1: 57; January 1, 1840.

  19 As only one example, Herzen’s Memoirs of a Young Man (1840) describes his friendship with Nikolay Ogarev with exactly the same throb of emotion. “By some incomprehensible force we gravitated toward each other; I had a presentiment of him as a brother, a close kinsman of my soul, and he felt the same about me. . . . [W]e were in love à la lettre, and we fell more and more in love with every day.” Schiller was their ideal, and “we appropriated to ourselves the characters of all of his heroes. Life opened out before us triumphantly, majestically; we sincerely vowed to sacrifice our lives for the good of mankind,” etc. In Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgens, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 4: 1823.

  20 See Joseph Frank, “Freud’s Case History of Dostoevsky,” in Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton, NJ, 1976), 379–392.

  21 Pis’ma, 1: 57; January 1, 1840.

  22 Ibid., 4: 233; December 3, 1837.

  23 Ibid., 1: 49; October 31, 1838.

  24 Ibid., 52; May 10, 1839.

  25 DVS, 1: 210.

  26 V. S. Nechaeva, V seme i usadbe Dostoevskikh (Moscow, 1939), 121.

  27 According to Andrey, a week after the death, with Dr. Dostoevsky already buried, his mother-in-law arrived to gather up the younger children and look after affairs. She was told by neighbors—a retired Major Khotyaintsev and his wife—that the death had not been natural but a murder; they advised her to let the matter rest so as to guard the interests of the family. This was the version of Dr. Dostoevsky’s end that she brought back to Moscow and that was accepted by the family.

  A recent investigator who inspected the records of the district has uncovered facts apparently unknown to the family. A rumor about a possible murder was first brought to the attention of the authorities by another neighbor, A. I. Leybrekht, who, under investigation by the provincial court, revealed that Major Khotyaintsev had asked him specifically to alert the authorities to the possibility of murder. Khotyaintsev was involved in a lawsuit against the Dostoevskys over land demarcation and was a wealthier landowner with five hundred souls. If some of the Dostoevsky peasants had been deported to Siberia as murderers, he could have snapped up the adjacent property for a song. This may explain why he wished to spread the rumor of murder but at the same time appear to be a friend of the family concerned over their interests.

  Dr. Dostoevsky’s corpse was examined independently by two doctors, both of whom concurred on the cause of death as being apoplexy. The investigation continued for over a year by various provincial legal bodies. Several peasants considered to be among the murderers were called in for interrogation, but no evidence of foul play was discovered. None of this further investigation was apparently known to Dr. Dostoevsky’s surviving children, and the story told to their grandmother by Khotyaintsev, entering into the family tradition, was given credence by Dostoevsky himself, with incalculable consequences for his moral and emotional equilibrium. DVS 1: 89–90; G. Fedorov, “K biografii F. M. Dostoevskomu,” Literaturnaya Gazeta 25 (June 18, 1975), 7.

  28 Pis’ma, 2: 549; August 16, 1839.

  29 Ibid., 550.

  30 Ibid.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Two Romanticisms

  In addition to the mathematics and engineering requirements, the Academy of Military Engineers also provided a humanistic education for future officers of the Russian Army. For at least the first year or two of his studies Dostoevsky attended lectures on religion, history, civil architecture, Russian and French language and literature, and also lessons in German. The chair in Russian literature was held by V. T. Plaksin, who accepted Romanticism as the art of the modern world; he lectured on Pushkin and Lermontov, and on the Russian folk poet Koltsov. From Plaksin, Dostoevsky could not have acquired much more in the way of ideas about literature than German Romantic doctrines. His professor of French literature, however, Joseph Cournant, was something else entirely, and Dostoevsky’s letters soon become studded with references not only to Racine, Corneille, and Pascal but also to such French Renaissance writers as Ronsard and Malherbe. Cournant included contemporary literature in his purview and introduced his students to Balzac, Hugo, George Sand, and Eugène Sue. Writing to his father in May 1839, Dostoevsky rather deceptively explains why it is “absolutely necessary” for him to subscribe to a French circulating library. “How many great works of genius there are—mathematical and military genius—in the French language.”1

  Dostoevsky’s studies at the academy, however, provided only the minor part of his humanistic education. The major share was obtained i
n the company of a young man, Ivan Nikolaevich Shidlovsky, a chance acquaintance whom the Dostoevskys met on their arrival in St. Petersburg. In 1873 Dostoevsky told a writer, come to gather material about him for a biographical article, “Mention Shidlovsky . . . he was a very important person for me then, and he deserves not to have his name sink into oblivion.”2 Ivan Shidlovsky had come to Petersburg to take up a post in the Ministry of Finance; like the Dostoevsky brothers, however, his heart was in literature and not in service to the state. Tall and striking in appearance, eloquent and loquacious, the twenty-one-year-old Shidlovsky impressed everybody by the depth of his culture and the passion of his perorations on lofty topics. Naturally, he wrote poetry himself, and he soon succeeded not only in breaking into print, but also in gaining entrée into the outer fringes of the literary life of the capital. Shortly after arriving he called on N. A. Polevoy, the defender of French Romanticism, whose own magazine had been closed in 1839 because of what Pushkin called its “Jacobin” tendencies and who had joined the staff of another publication. One can well imagine the tremendous effect that Shidlovsky must have made on the budding author, and the aureole that soon surrounded him in the younger man’s bedazzled eyes. Shidlovsky was the first person to take Dostoevsky’s literary aspirations seriously and to encourage them with example, precept, and counsel.

  Whenever Dostoevsky could get away from the academy for a free moment, he would spend it with Shidlovsky; and when his friend left Petersburg for good, probably sometime in late 1839, he was disconsolate. “I often sat together with him for whole evenings talking of God knows what!” he writes Mikhail. “Oh, what a pure and candid soul!”3 They talked about the great writers whom Dostoevsky was reading under Shidlovsky’s tutelage (“we spoke of Homer, Shakespeare, Schiller, Hoffmann”),4 and it was largely through his eyes that Dostoevsky now began to view the great Romantic culture heroes whose very names filled him with awe.

  A typical Russian Romantic of the 1830s, Shidlovsky was consumed, as they all were, with unappeasable desires that could not be satisfied within the bounds of earthly life. His few extant poems are all expressions of this Romantic malaise, which leads him to melancholy questionings about the meaning of human existence. No answer is ever given to these inquiries, but Shidlovsky is consoled by the belief that there is a God who sometimes vouchsafes his presence in nature and holds out hope of solace to unhappy humans. Dostoevsky was a great admirer of these poems. “Ah, soon, soon, I shall read the new poems of Ivan Nikolaevich,” he writes Mikhail in the fall of 1838. “What poetry! What inspired ideas!”5

  In a long letter that Shidlovsky wrote to Mikhail in February 1839, he writes equally freely and casually about his urge to go off on a drinking spree with Mikhail, and his flirtations with the wives of friends who aspire to be immortalized in his verse. Shidlovsky, evidently, was one of those “broad” Russian natures, oscillating between the most contradictory moral impulses, that Dostoevsky later so often portrayed. No doubt his complete freedom from any kind of stuffiness constituted one source of the magnetism he exercised on his younger friends. But Shidlovsky’s ebullience did not prevent him from plunging into one severe spiritual crisis after another brought on by his torn and divided personality.

  He tried, in but one example, to fight off a temptation to suicide by increased fervency in prayer; and on Christmas day, he tells Mikhail, the miracle occurred: “some sort of wonderful illumination shone before my eyes; tears gushed forth passionately—and I believed.”6 “We must believe,” he writes in another passage, “that God is good, for otherwise He is not God; that the beauty of the Universe is this visible and tangible goodness. . . . This is the only true sign of the great poet, who is man at his highest peak; soil him with dirt, slander him, oppress him, torture him, his soul will nonetheless stand firm, true to itself, and the Angel of inspiration will guide him safely out of the dungeon of life into the world of immortality. . . . the body, a clay vessel, sooner or later is shattered, and all our past vices and occasional virtues vanish without a trace.”7 These ideas that Dostoevsky was eagerly absorbing from the lips of his master were a fine example both of the Romantic egoism and of the urge for pantheistic self-obliteration that had been stimulated by the influence of Schelling and was so widespread in the 1830s. In his famous Literary Reveries, the young critic V. G. Belinsky—soon to become the most important cultural force of his time—had written that man’s “infinite, supreme felicity consists in the dissolution of Self in the feeling of love” for all of God’s creation.8

  How thoroughly Dostoevsky assimilated the values of this Romantic phase of Russian culture may be judged from his letter to Mikhail a year later. “One had only to look at [Shidlovsky] to see what he was: a martyr! He had become thin; his cheeks sunken; his sparkling eyes dry and burning; the moral beauty of his face heightened as the physical declined. He was suffering, cruelly suffering. My God, how he loved the young girl. . . . She had married someone else. Without this love he would not have been this priest of poetry, pure, noble, disinterested. . . . [H]e was a marvelous, exalted being, the true sketch of man as Shakespeare and Schiller have shown him; but he was just then on the point of falling into the dark madness of Byronic characters.”9 This last phrase probably alludes to Schidlovsky’s struggle against the temptation of suicide.

  Dostoevsky’s wide-eyed hero worship is touchingly naïve in its expression, but what he saw in Shidlovsky was the living embodiment of the great Romantic conflict between man and his destiny by which his imagination had now become ignited. Shidlovsky brought him face-to-face with man as “a marvelous, exalted being,” just as Dostoevsky had learned to apprehend him in Shakespeare and Schiller; no poring over texts could have conveyed with such vital immediacy the heights and depths of the Romantic experience. The supreme nobility of a hopeless (and disinterested because hopeless) passion, the spiritual value of suffering for an unattainable ideal, the role of the poet as self-sacrificing “priest” of this Romantic dispensation, proclaiming his faith and his love of God in the midst of his travails—all this Dostoevsky now accepts as the very acme of sublimity.

  M. H. Abrams has sharpened our awareness of how the “characteristic concepts and patterns of Romantic philosophy and literature are a displaced and reconstituted theology” and represent a return to Christian fashions of feeling.10 “A conspicuous Romantic tendency, after the rationalism and decorum of the Enlightenment,” he writes, “was a reversion to the stark drama and suprarational mysteries of the Christian story and doctrines and to the violent conflicts and abrupt reversals of the Christian inner life, turning on extremes of destruction and creation, hell and heaven, exile and reunion, death and rebirth, dejection and joy, paradise lost and paradise regained.”11 The Romantic values that Dostoevsky assimilated from Shidlovsky were thus a recasting, in early nineteenth-century terms, of the same religious agitations and questionings that had stirred him profoundly as a young boy in the book of Job. And here we can locate an even deeper reason, besides the ones already mentioned, for the importance that Dostoevsky assigned to Shidlovsky in his life: Shidlovsky’s primary role was to have aided Dostoevsky in making the transition between his childhood faith and its sophisticated modern equivalents. No wonder Dostoevsky was everlastingly grateful to the man who had performed this crucial task!

  Dostoevsky did not have to suffer any agonizing reevaluation of his old beliefs in adapting himself to the new world of Romantic culture that he was so eager to assimilate. Nor should one underestimate the future influence of Shidlovsky’s living demonstration that intense religious commitment could be combined with a frank confession of the torments of doubt; genuine faith for Dostoevsky would never afterward be confused with a tranquil acceptance of dogma. Dostoevsky, it is true, soon left this Romantic phase behind, and often later parodied and satirized various types of Romantic egoism. But the Romantic dissatisfaction with the limits of earthly life and, in particular, its positive valuation of moral suffering always remained a feature of his own worldvi
ew.

  Russian culture in the mid-1830s—during the period of Dostoevsky’s most receptive adolescence—was in a period of transition between the predominant influence of German Romantic literature and Idealist philosophy, on the one hand, and the beginning of a turn toward that of French social Romanticism (which included a good deal of what came to be called social Realism or, in Russia, Naturalism), on the other. The generation of the 1820s had grown up in a time of great political turmoil and took a strong interest in social and political matters. As every reader of Evgeny Onegin will recall, the St. Petersburg dandy of the time considered an acquaintance with the doctrines of Adam Smith an indispensable part of his mental wardrobe.12 The shock administered to Russian society by the Decembrist uprising and its sternly repressive aftermath, however, turned the thoughts of the next generation into other channels. The seeds of German Romantic influence had already been well planted before 1825, and they blossomed luxuriously in the sternly nonpolitical hothouse climate fostered by Nicholas I.

  As a result, concern with the practical affairs of man and society was now scornfully rejected as unworthy of the true dignity of the human spirit. Only by striving to unriddle the secrets of the Absolute could man remain faithful to the high calling revealed to him by his own self-consciousness. Art and Idealist metaphysics replaced all other areas of life as the focus of cultural interest. Only one publication—Polevoy’s The Moscow Telegraph—stood out against this current and strove, particularly after the French revolution of 1830, to put in a good word for the strong social and Socialist orientation of much of the new French literature. But Polevoy’s own work as a novelist reveals the hybrid amalgam of influences so typical of the mid-1830s: his main emphasis is on the eternal disparity between the dreams of imagination and the limits of the real. Dostoevsky came to intellectual maturity during the mid-1830s, and he was profoundly affected by the disparate mixture of cultural tendencies prevalent in these years.