Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  This was the already notorious personality whom Dostoevsky began to visit in the spring of 1847. He went to Petrashevsky’s as he would have gone to any other social gathering. There was nothing secret or conspiratorial about Petrashevsky’s Fridays any more than there had been about the reunions of the Belinsky Pléiade or the Beketov Circle. After all, people came together to talk a little more freely about the same matters that were being broached in the literary journals. It was generally believed that, as long as such conversation was carried on behind closed doors, there was nothing to fear from the government. A lively young Petersburger, in a letter dating from the beginning of 1848, lists among the attractions of the city “the sermons of Nilson, the propaganda of Petrashevsky, and the public lectures and feuilletons of Pleshcheev”23—all seemed to him to exist on the same level of tolerated public diversion and expression of opinion. This belief, as we shall soon see, was mistaken.

  By the late spring of 1848, with increasing membership that fluctuated from week to week, the meetings turned into a sort of debating club, and a small bell, with a handle suspiciously carved in the figure of a statue of liberty, was used to regulate the ebb and flow of talk. D. D. Akhsharumov, who later became a doctor and a pioneer in Russian social hygiene, writes that the gatherings were “an interesting kaleidoscope of the most diversified opinions about contemporary events, the decisions of the government, . . . contemporary literature . . . happenings in the city were brought up, everything was talked about at the top of one’s voice, without the slightest restraint. . . . Because of the . . . conversations touching primarily on social-political questions, these Petrashevsky evenings interested us enormously; they were the only ones of their kind in Petersburg. The gatherings usually continued far into the night, until two or three in the morning, and ended with a modest supper.”24

  Dostoevsky did not frequent the Petrashevsky meetings assiduously during the first year and a half, and Yanovsky says that he spoke of the gatherings contemptuously, attributing their popularity both to the free refreshments and to a desire “to play at liberalism, because, you see, which of us mortals does not enjoy playing that game.”25 The Petrashevsky milieu could hardly have replaced either the Pléiade or the Beketov Circle in his affections. Both of these had been small groups bound together by ties of personal friendship and common aims, while Dostoevsky and Petrashevsky did not even get on well together. Dostoevsky would certainly have disliked Petrashevsky’s rampant Left Hegelian atheism as much as he had disliked that of Belinsky, and we can imagine him disliking it a good deal more. Belinsky’s tempestuous explosions were at least indicative of a genuine emotional concern for the dilemmas of religious faith, and the warmth and good-heartedness of his character, as well as his genius as a critic, no doubt made up for a good deal. Petrashevsky was of an entirely different temperament and always spoke of religion with coldly hostile sarcasm or scornfully mocking irreverence. After Dostoevsky’s death, Nikolay Speshnev—about whom we shall soon be hearing a good deal—told Mme Dostoevsky that “Petrashevsky had produced a repulsive impression on [Dostoevsky] because he was an atheist and mocked at faith.”26

  Like all of the intelligentsia, Dostoevsky was oppressed by the general lack of freedom in Russian social life; but the most insufferable injustice—the issue that stirred his deepest emotional responses—was the enslavement of the peasantry. On May 18, 1847, however, Nicholas I insisted, in a speech to a delegation of nobles, that peasants could not be considered “as private property, and even more as goods,”27 and he asked for the aid of the nobility in helping him to convert the status of the peasants from serfs to that of tenants. News of this pronouncement, spreading like wildfire through the capital, aroused the highest hopes; even Belinsky became convinced that Nicholas was at least determined to cut out the deadly cancer threatening the life of Russian society. There was, as a result, very little sense of political urgency in the talk at Petrashevsky’s before the fall of 1848. Articles were read and views exchanged on every conceivable subject; the advantages of one or another Socialist system were pondered and weighed; the rigors of the censorship were condemned; the malfeasance of various highly placed bureaucratic officials exposed. But the final effect must have been that sense of exasperated impotence that, we may assume, Dostoevsky could tolerate only in small and intermittent doses.

  This atmosphere of stagnation was swept away by the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, which caused panic in Russian ruling circles and a wild excitement among the intelligentsia. The tsar himself, when the news arrived, was supposed to have erupted in the midst of a ball clutching at the telegraphic dispatch and ordered his dancing officers to saddle their horses. Herzen has left a picture of frenzied Petersburgers snatching the newspapers from each other’s hands at cafés until, finally, someone clambered on a table and read to all the others at the top of his voice. Alexander Milyukov conveys the rebellious mood that swept over the intelligentsia as the astonishing news kept pouring in from abroad. “From the first day of the February revolution, the most incredible events succeeded one another in Europe. The unheard-of reforms of Pius IX provoked uprisings in Milan, Venice, Naples; the surge of liberal ideas in Germany provoked revolutions in Berlin and Vienna. . . . The rotten foundations of the old reaction were falling, and a new life was beginning for all of Europe. But, at the same time, the most oppressive stagnation reigned in Russia; thought and the press were confined more and more, and no activity appeared anywhere since social life had been crushed. . . . Practically with every mail delivery from abroad, we heard about new rights granted to the people, whether willingly or not, while in Russian society we heard only rumors of more limitations and constraints. Whoever remembers that period knows how all this worked on the minds of the youthful intelligentsia.”28

  The first effect of this mutinous restlessness was to swell the ranks of the Petrashevtsy with an influx of new members. Never before had the gatherings been so well attended and so lively, and beginning in the fall of 1848 Dostoevsky began to show up at Petrashevsky’s Fridays with some regularity. In the back of everyone’s mind, of course, was the question of whether the Russian regime itself could indefinitely escape the fate that had overtaken the absolute monarchs of Europe, and the talk at Petrashevsky’s began to focus more directly on Russian social-political problems. All the more because, as Herzen noted, “all the rumors about the intention of the Tsar to declare the liberation of the peasants, which had become very widespread . . . instantly ceased.”29 It was at this time that the Petrashevsky gatherings were organized on a more formal basis, and a “president” was chosen each Friday to take charge of the animated arguments.

  With the crisis atmosphere in the country brought on by the revolutions in Europe, it was inevitable that the meetings at Petrashevsky’s would arouse suspicion. His escapades had already called him to the notice of the secret police, and he had been placed under discreet observation in 1844. At the beginning of 1848 he incautiously circulated a petition among the St. Petersburg nobility calling for a revision of the law governing the sale of estates. The purpose of this proposal was to raise the value of such property by making it available to non-noble buyers, but such a buyer would be required to change the status of peasants, after purchase, from serf to tenant. Petrashevsky thought this a very clever maneuver to enlist the greed of the landowners on the side of the peasant emancipation. The only result, however, was to alert the authorities once again to his irritating, gadfly existence.

  Deciding to investigate him more carefully, both the secret police and the Ministry of Internal Affairs placed Petrashevsky under secret surveillance. Agents of the ministry reported, after ten months, that meetings were taking place in his home every Friday lasting until three or four in the morning. “They [the guests] . . . read, spoke, and disputed; but what exactly they spoke about it was impossible to determine because of the caution and secrecy with which Petrashevsky surrounded himself.”30 Accordingly, a secret agent named Antonelli turned up
as a fellow employee of Petrashevsky at the ministry in January 1849. Antonelli furnished his superiors with regular reports of his conversations with the suspect; and though Petrashevsky was suspicious of his efforts to ingratiate himself, Antonelli was present at the last seven meetings of the circle between March 11 and April 22.

  The information regarding Dostoevsky’s participation in the debates of the Petrashevsky Circle is scanty. Denying to the investigation commission that he had ever held forth at Petrashevsky’s about social or political matters, Dostoevsky admitted that he took the floor twice on other subjects. “Once about literature, . . . and the other time about personality and egoism.”31 There are, indeed, few traces of Dostoevsky as an active presence in the ample material about the circle that has become available since the 1920s. Only in the very last weeks of its existence does his name figure at all among those who took a leading part in discussion.

  Dostoevsky’s reluctance to participate more vigorously in their debates could not have sprung from ignorance. Count Semenov knew Dostoevsky intimately (the lonely young writer frequently visited his apartment) and remembers him as one of the most erudite people he knew; according to Semenov, he had read extensively in the history of the French Revolution (Thiers, Mignet, Louis Blanc), as well as in Socialist theory (Saint-Simon, Fourier).32 The list of the works that Dostoevsky withdrew from Petrashevsky’s collection shows that the range of the material he consulted spans the gamut of problems that were being discussed at the meetings. For a firsthand contact with Left Hegelian thought, Dostoevsky took out Strauss’s Life of Jesus. Blanc’s three-volume Histoire des dix ans covered recent French history and brought him up-to-date on the social-political conditions that had led to the creation of Utopian Socialism. He also withdrew several works of Proudhon (titles unknown), and Paget’s Introduction à l’étude de la science sociale—one of the best popularizations of Fourierism then available. In Étienne Cabet’s Le vrai Christianisme suivant J. Christ, Dostoevsky came across the argument that total communist egalitarianism was the only true Christianity.

  If Dostoevsky did not throw himself more wholeheartedly into the fray at Petrashevsky’s, it was because he was uninterested in the interminable debates over the merits of one or another Socialist system. He was in accord with the moral impulse inspiring them, but he was not persuaded that any of their panaceas could be put into practice. “Socialism offers a thousand methods of social organization,” he commented in his deposition, “and since all of these books are written intelligently, fervently, and often with genuine love for mankind, I read them with curiosity. But . . . I do not adhere to any of the social systems, . . . and . . . I am convinced that the application of any of them would bring with it inescapable ruin, and I am not talking about us but even in France.”33

  Although this declaration was made under duress, it expresses an attitude that Dostoevsky shared with many of his contemporaries. Valerian Maikov too had been sympathetic to Socialist ideals but skeptical about the feasibility of any of the specific programs advanced by the various schools, and the same position inspired an important series of articles published in The Contemporary in 1847 by Vladimir Milyutin, a brilliant young economist who was an intimate of Maikov and who also turned up at Petrashevsky’s.

  Milyutin saw Socialist theories as inspired by an admirably humanitarian aim, but concerned, like Maikov—and Dostoevsky—with the freedom of the individual, he criticized the “new schools” for limiting this freedom drastically. The Utopias of the Socialists are still in what Milyutin calls their mythological-metaphysical phase. Exactly the same idea is expressed in Dostoevsky’s deposition. “Socialism is a science in ferment,” he explained to his judges. “It seems to me, however, that out of the present chaos something consistent, logical, and beneficial will be worked out for the common good.”34 In contrast to these pieties, Dostoevsky was already thinking along more concrete and down-to-earth lines, linking Socialist ideas with existing Russian conditions. Alexander Milyukov, who belonged to one of the several satellite groups that had now formed around the Petrashevsky Circle, writes in his memoirs that Dostoevsky especially insisted “that all these theories had no importance for us, that we should [look to] the life and age-old historical organizations of our people, where in the obshchina [communal ownership of land], artel [worker’s wage-sharing cooperative], and in the principles of mutual village responsibility [for the payment of taxes] there have long since existed much more solid and normal foundations than in all the dreams of Saint-Simon and his school. He said that life in an Icarian commune or phalanstery seemed to him more terrible and repugnant than any prison.”35

  More important, however, is that we see another idea emerging in Milyukov’s account. Since “true” or “natural” Socialism is already contained in the social institutions of the Russian peasantry, these furnish a basis for the construction of a new social order superior to the artificial Utopias of the Western Socialists. Because this idea is at the heart of the later Russian Populism and was to prove of such tremendous importance for Dostoevsky, Milyukov has been accused of smuggling the opinions of the post-Siberian Dostoevsky back into the 1840s.36 The evidence, though, tends to confirm Milyukov’s words. Franco Venturi, in his magisterial history of Russian Populism, notes the existence of an embryonic “Populist” wing among the Petrashevtsy.37 It is within this group—who were following Belinsky’s recent injunction to work out the solution to Russian social problems in Russian terms—that Dostoevsky must be placed.

  Dostoevsky’s thoughts, as we see, were thus immovably riveted on Russia and Russian problems. These subjects were rarely discussed at Petrashevsky’s in terms he thought sensible, and so he took the floor only to expound some idea important for his literary work. But if Dostoevsky was known for his indifference whenever the talk revolved around the fine points of Socialist doctrine, he was equally notorious for his impassioned intensity whenever it focused on the problem of serfdom. For there is one overwhelming impression that emerges from all the accounts of Dostoevsky given in the memoirs: he was, literally, someone who found it impossible to control himself whenever he spoke about the mistreatment of the enslaved peasantry.

  Count Semenov, present on one such occasion, diagnoses the emotive source of Dostoevsky’s radicalism in the 1840s. “Dostoevsky,” he writes, “was never, and could never be, a revolutionary; but, as a man of feeling, he could be carried away by a wave of indignation and even hatred at the sight of violence being perpetrated on the insulted and injured. This happened, for example, when he saw or heard about the sergeant of the Finnish regiment having had to run the gauntlet. Only in such moments of outrage was he capable of rushing into the street with a red flag.”38

  Dostoevsky spoke with uncontrollable fervor at such moments. “I remember very well,” writes Milyukov, “that he was particularly outraged at the mistreatment from which both the lowest class and the youth in school suffered.”39 These horrors inspired Dostoevsky to sudden outbursts of blazing eloquence. Some members of the circle even felt him to have the makings of a born agitator. It was perhaps Dostoevsky’s volcanic eruptiveness, whenever he spoke about serfdom, that brought him to the attention of the enigmatic and fascinating Nikolay Speshnev. For within the amorphous agglomeration of the Petrashevsky Circle, the iron-willed Speshnev was one of the few ruthlessly determined to turn words into deeds, and he was on the watch for people he might recruit for this purpose. He formed a little circle that was the only true secret society to emerge from the Petrashevsky Fridays, and Dostoevsky was among its members. Not Belinsky or Petrashevsky but Speshnev was Dostoevsky’s mentor in revolutionary radicalism; it was Speshnev who shaped Dostoevsky’s conception of what underground conspiracy meant in practice.

  1 Pis’ma, 1: 95; September 17, 1846.

  2 Ibid., October 7, 1846.

  3 Ibid., 103; November 26, 1846.

  4 D. V. Grigorovich, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 12 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1896), 12: 277.

  5 Cited from the
memoirs of Flerovsky in Sorokovye gody XIX veka (Moscow, 1959), 191.

  6 V. I. Kuleshov, Naturalnaya shkola v literature XIX veka (Moscow, 1965), 145.

  7 A. N. Pleshcheev, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Leningrad, 1964), 83.

  8 Valerian Maikov, Kriticheskie opyty (St. Petersburg, 1891), 25–31.

  9 Ibid., 325.

  10 Ibid., 327.

  11 Ibid., 342.

  12 Ibid., 68.

  13 Ibid., 295.

  14 Ibid., 66.

  15 Ibid., 64.

  16 V. G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1948), 371.

  17 Ibid., 359–360.

  18 Ibid., 363.

  19 Ibid., 375.

  20 Pis’ma, 1: 106; January–February, 1847.

  21 Cited in V. I. Semevsky, M. V. Butashevich–Petrashevsky i Petrashevtsy (Moscow, 1922), 153.

  22 N. F. Belchikov, Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev (Moscow, 1971), 153. This volume, first published in 1936, reproduces all the official documents concerning Dostoevsky’s involvement in the Petrashevsky affair, along with excellent editorial comments and clarification.