Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  1 Pis’ma, 1: 108; January–February 1847.

  2 Cited in V. S. Nechaeva, V. G. Belinsky, 4 vols. (Leningrad, 1949–1967), 4: 298.

  3 Dostoevsky evidently found that the easy manner of the feuilletonist fitted him like a glove, and one never finds him later, even when presumably expounding ideas, writing anything that can be considered ordinary expository prose. His stance is always personal and intimate; his points are made not by logical persuasion but through sketching character types, dramatizing attitudes, narrating experiences and observations. The whimsical tone of the feuilletonist of the 1840s, though never abandoned completely, is replaced by that of the serious and sometimes choleric social observer, but his use of irony and persiflage remains the same, and so does the identification with the reader, who becomes an implicit partner in a dialogue. From this point of view, Dostoevsky’s five-finger exercises in the 1840s mark the début of an essential aspect of his career. Among the most striking features of Notes from Underground is its artistic singularity; it seems to come, formally speaking, from nowhere, but it probably comes from the feuilleton. Such an origin would account for all of the original formal features of the novella, which are so baffling otherwise—the first-person narrator who takes us into his confidence to the point of embarrassment; the direct address to the reader, who is treated as an interlocutor; the apparent fortuitousness and haphazardness of the narrative sequence; the blend of irony and pathos.

  4 Cited in A. G. Tseitlin, I. A. Goncharov (Moscow, 1950), 62.

  5 V. G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1948), 478.

  6 Yu. M. Proskurina, “Povestvovatel’-rasskazchik v romane F. M. Dostoevskogo Belye nochi,” Filologicheskie Nauki 9 (1966), 133.

  7 Pis’ma, 1: 103; November 26, 1846.

  8 V. G. Belinsky, Izbrannye pis’ma, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1955), 2: 369–370.

  9 Ibid., 388.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Pis’ma, 1: 104; December 17, 1846.

  12 Ibid., 89; April 1, 1846.

  13 Ibid., 104; December 17, 1846.

  14 Cited in ZT, 52.

  CHAPTER 11

  Belinsky and Dostoevsky: II

  To the public and literary aspects of their involvement must be added the asserted direct influence of the renowned critic on the formation of the young man’s convictions and beliefs. Thirty years later, Dostoevsky published two articles about Belinsky in his Diary of a Writer, and their burden is that Belinsky was the ideological mentor responsible for having placed Dostoevsky’s feet on the path leading to Siberia.

  Dostoevsky’s account provides an irresistibly hagiographic version of the great drama of his conscience. Before meeting Belinsky, he had been a young, pure-hearted, idealistic, naïvely devout believer in the God and Christ of his childhood faith. It was Belinsky, the revered idol of Russian radical youth, who had succeeded in converting him to Socialism and atheism. The result had been his participation in subversive activity, and then his arrest, conviction, and exile to Siberia. There he rediscovered God and Christ through the Russian people, and came to realize that atheism could lead only to personal and social destruction. Dostoevsky’s articles of 1873, however, do not quite jibe with what we know of his life.

  Belinsky’s name had become a slogan and a banner to successive generations of Russian radicals, and it is about this mythical or symbolic Belinsky that Dostoevsky was really writing in the 1870s. In a letter of 1871 to Nikolay Strakhov, who had objected to the violence of Dostoevsky’s language about Belinsky, Dostoevsky replies: “I insulted Belinsky more as a phenomenon of Russian life than as a personality.”1 The portrait Dostoevsky sketched of him two years later is dominated by this impersonal perspective, and the result, as we shall see, is that he integrates his own personal history—even when the facts do not quite fit—into the general image he wishes to create of Belinsky’s baneful effect on Russian culture as a whole.

  By the time the critic and the young writer met in 1845, Belinsky’s point of view had evolved in a manner that took Dostoevsky by surprise. When Belinsky converted to French Utopian Socialism in 1841–1842, he accepted a doctrine strongly informed by Christian moral-religious values. Saint-Simon had entitled the last work he wrote Le nouveau Christianisme, and all of French Utopian Socialism may be summed up under the same title. The Utopian Socialists directed their attention to the morality of the Gospels, and they saw Christ (much as Dostoevsky had done in 1838) as a divine figure come to prescribe the laws governing earthly life in the modern world and whose teachings, freed from centuries of perversion, were at last to be put into practice.

  The “new Christianity” of Utopian Socialism was based on an opposition between the true religion of Jesus Christ—a religion of hope and light, of faith in the powers of man as well as in the beneficence of God—and a false religion of fear and eternal damnation that distorted Christ’s teaching. Victor Considérant makes this contrast explicit in his La destinée sociale, one of the most widely read of all Socialist treatises in Russia during the 1840s. “Take care!” he warns the supporters of the old religion of fear, “you who condemn God to desire the humiliation and misery of man here on earth, . . . man in his strength and intelligence . . . will know that he has nothing to fear from [God], but everything to hope for.”2 A devout adherence to the new Christianity went hand in hand with fierce opposition to the established Church as a source of ignorance and obscurantism and as an ally of political reaction. Hence, in the same letter to V. P. Botkin announcing his conversion to a Socialism in which “Christ will pass His power to the Father, and Father-Reason will hold sway once more, but this time . . . above a new world,” Belinsky scoffs at a friend who retains “his warm faith in the muzhik with the little beard who, sitting belching on a soft cloud surrounded by a multitude of seraphs and cherubims, considers that his might is right and his thunders and lightnings rational demonstrations.”3

  Meanwhile, however, the ideas of the German Left Hegelians had begun to penetrate into Russia almost simultaneously with those of the Utopian Socialists. Left Hegelianism was primarily a critique of religion, and the effect of its influence was to call into question the religious foundation of Utopian Socialist convictions. D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus considered the New Testament to be not divine revelation but a mythopoetic expression of the historical aspirations of the Jewish community of the time. It was only a historical accident, Strauss maintained, that these myths had crystallized around the figure of Jesus Christ, who was merely one of the many self-proclaimed prophets of the period. Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity was even more radical in its secularization of the divine, and argued that, instead of God having created man in his own image, exactly the opposite was true. The human species had divinized its highest attributes by projecting them onto supernatural beings and, in doing so, had alienated its own essence. The task of mankind was now to reclaim from the transcendent all the qualities that rightfully belonged to humanity, and to realize them on earth by incorporating them into social life.

  Such ideas burst like a bombshell among the Russian Westernizers, already well schooled to appreciate them from their previous training in Hegel’s thought. A copy of Feuerbach arrived in Russia in January 1842, and Annenkov remembers this book as having been “in everybody’s hands” in the mid-1840s. “Feuerbach’s book,” he writes, “nowhere produced so powerful an impression as in our ‘Western’ circle, and nowhere did it so rapidly obliterate the remnants of all preceding outlooks. Herzen, needless to say, was a fervent expositor of its propositions and conclusions.”4 Belinsky, however, was not won over as quickly as Annenkov implies. He had, as he confessed himself, a congenital need for religion, and he was still arguing about God with Turgenev—just freshly returned from the philosophical Mecca of Berlin—in the spring of 1843.

  Reporting on one such interminable colloquy, the novelist recalls Belinsky saying reproachfully to him, “We haven’t yet decided the question of the existence of God . . . and you want to eat!”5 By 1845,
though, just a few months before meeting Dostoevsky, Belinsky had come to the conclusion, as he writes Herzen, that “in the words God and religion I see darkness, gloom, chains and the knout, and now I like these two words as much as the four following them.”6 These phrases mark the moment when atheism and Socialism fused together in Russia into an alliance never afterward to be completely dissolved. Not all the Russian Westernizers, to be sure, were willing to accept atheism as a new obligatory credo. T. N. Granovsky—a famous liberal historian at the University of Moscow, who was one day to sit for the portrait of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky in Demons—refused to give up his belief in the immortality of the soul, and in the summer of 1846 he broke with Herzen over the issue—a rift that occurred almost simultaneously with Dostoevsky’s first meeting with Belinsky.

  Even though Left Hegelianism was militantly antireligious, at first it attacked only the historicity and divinity of God and Christ; the moral-religious values that Christ had proclaimed to the world were left untouched. Feuerbach in particular declared Christian moral-religious values to be the true essence of human nature; his aim was not to replace such values by others but to see them realized in the love of man for man rather than for the God-man. Soon, however, the rejection of the divinity of Christ led to a questioning of the moral-religious ideals that Christ had proclaimed, and this was greatly aided by the appearance of the last and most sensational of the Left Hegelian treatises, Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own. Stirner argued that the acceptance of any abstract or general moral value was an impediment to man’s freedom and alienated the human personality as much as a belief in supernatural beings did. Of no group was he more scornful, no antagonist did he attack more mercilessly, than the Socialists and liberals still clinging to their general ideal of “humanity.” What is fundamental for the individual ego, according to Stirner, is simply the satisfaction of its own needs, whatever these may be; his philosophy is that of a totally subjective and totally amoral self-aggrandizement.

  From Annenkov we know that Belinsky was quite concerned with Stirner’s book during the summer of 1847. “It has been proved,” Annenkov reports him as saying, “that a man feels and thinks and acts invariably according to the law of egotistical urges, and indeed, he cannot have any others.” To be sure, Belinsky did not take the word “egoism” in Stirner’s narrowly selfish sense, and believed that individuals could eventually be made to realize that their own “egotistical interests are identical with that of mankind as a whole.”7 What is important, though, is Belinsky’s evident willingness to accept Stirner’s nonidealistic view of the roots of human behavior, the critic’s desire to search for a new, more “practical” and “rational” foundation for his values. We find the same impulse at work in his attraction for the physiological Materialism of Emile Littré, and he now refers privately to the starry-eyed Utopian Socialists, with contemptuous obscenity, as “those insects hatched from the manure heaped up from the backside of Rousseau.”8

  Belinsky’s important manifesto in the first issue of The Contemporary, defining the ideological line of the rejuvenated periodical, bears unmistakable evidence of the change in his ideas. “Psychology which is not based on physiology,” he announces, under the influence of Littré, “is as unsubstantial as physiology that knows not the existence of anatomy.” He foresees the day when “chemical analysis” will “penetrate the mysterious laboratory of nature” and will “by observations of the embryo . . . trace the physical process of moral evolution.”9 The Soviet historian of the journal, Evgenyev-Maksimov, remarks that “the recipes proposed by Utopian Socialism had already (1847) lost credit in the eyes of the majority of the contributors to The Contemporary. Skeptical and even contemptuous utterances concerning this tendency in Western European social thought are by no means rare.”10 These influential articles ridiculed such pillars of Utopianism as Pierre Leroux, Cabet, and Victor Considérant and praised Proudhon’s just-published Système des contradictions èconomiques for having abandoned fantasy and devoted itself to the study of economic laws governing existing society. In the last three years of his life, Annenkov observes, Belinsky “was concerned . . . with the new truths proclaimed by economic doctrines which was liquidating all notions of the old, displaced truth about the moral, the good and the noble on earth, and was putting in their place formulas and theses of a purely rational character.”11

  A feature of Utopian Socialist “religion” had been, as Maxime Leroy writes, “a divinization of the people,”12 who were considered morally superior to their upper-class oppressors; and Belinsky also quickly abandoned this idealization of the oppressed masses. At the beginning of 1848 he defends Voltaire in a letter to Annenkov, even though the great Frenchman had “sometimes called the people ‘vile populace.’ ” Belinsky justifies this insulting phrase “because the people are uncultivated, superstitious, fanatic, bloodthirsty, and love torture and execution.” He adds that Bakunin (now an ardent revolutionary) and the Slavophils, by their excessive idealization of the people, have “greatly helped me to throw off a mystical faith in the people.”13 Such is the atmosphere of the last period of Belinsky’s thought, which began shortly after Dostoevsky met him in 1845 and was certainly apparent in 1846. There is every reason to believe that Dostoevsky was familiar with its manifestations.

  During the span of Dostoevsky’s friendship with Belinsky, the critic was thus oscillating between a Feuerbachian “humanism” with moral-religious overtones and the acceptance of a more “rational” viewpoint shading toward mechanistic materialism and moral determinism. We should remember, however, that Belinsky had little use for intellectual consistency as such, and the quick portrait of Belinsky sketched by Dostoevsky in his two articles of 1873 coincides with the image that emerges from a study of all the other materials. “Valuing science, and realism above everything,” Dostoevsky writes in his second article, “at the same time he [Belinsky] understood more deeply than anyone else that reason, science, and realism alone could construct only an anthill and not a social ‘harmony’ within which it would be possible for mankind to live. He knew that, at the foundation of everything, were moral principles,”14 and he knew that in attacking Christianity, which was based on the moral responsibility of the individual, he was not only undermining the foundations of the society he wished to destroy but also denying human liberty. But Belinsky also believed, in Dostoevsky’s view, that Socialism would restore the freedom of the personality and raise it to hitherto undreamed-of heights.

  It is this Utopian Socialist Belinsky (perhaps still intermittently a “new Christian”), passionately concerned with the freedom of the individual personality, who dominates in the second article, which includes the only direct public testimony that Dostoevsky ever gave about his participation in the Petrashevsky affair, which led to his imprisonment and Siberian exile, and the motives inspiring him. His aim was to convince his readers of the 1870s that radicals were not stirred to action by dishonorable motives: “the Socialism then . . . was regarded merely as a corrective to, and improvement of [Christianity]. . . . All these new ideas seemed in the highest degree holy and moral and, most important, universal, the future law for all mankind without exception. . . . By 1846 I had already been consecrated into all the truth of this ‘future regeneration of the world’ and into all the holiness of the future Communistic society by Belinsky.”15

  What is distorted here is simply Dostoevsky’s assertion that it was Belinsky who had indoctrinated him with such ideas. We know very well that Dostoevsky had become converted to this sort of moral-religious Socialism at least several years before he met Belinsky. As a novelist, though, Dostoevsky instinctively reached after dramatic concentration, and he cast his own life here in its most effective form. Belinsky, after all, had played the role assigned to him by Dostoevsky in Russian culture of the 1840s. Why confuse the reader with the insignificant details of his own personal history?

  Dostoevsky’s strategy becomes clearer if we examine the first article—written a month
or two earlier—in which he aimed to convince his readers that Socialism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible, notwithstanding the honorable and idealistic motives of its youthful adherents. He appeals to his own experience of the later phase of Belinsky to prove the point, and once again he dresses up his recollections to convey an impression that is not autobiographically accurate. For he implies that Belinsky had converted him to atheism, and to that rejection of Christian moral-religious values that usually accompanied such a conversion in the late 1840s. The polemical intent is clear: Socialism in Russia had been atheistic and anti-Christian from the start, and it was impossible to maintain any connection between it and Christian morality. “As a Socialist,” Dostoevsky writes, “[Belinsky] was duty bound to destroy the teachings of Christ, to call it a deceptive and ignorant philanthropy [chelovekolyubie], condemned by modern science and economic doctrines.”16