Dostoevsky
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Idealist aestheticians (Hegel and F. T. Vischer) viewed art as a function of man’s desire to improve the imperfections of nature in the name of the ideal. Chernyshevsky, taking the opposite view, flatly affirmed that “Beauty is Life” and that nature, far from being less perfect than art, was the sole source of true pleasure and infinitely superior to art in every respect. Indeed, art exists only because it is impossible for man always to satisfy his real needs; hence, art is useful, but solely as a surrogate until the genuine article comes along. “The imagination builds castles in the air,” Chernyshevsky writes sarcastically, “when the dreamer lacks not only a good house, but even a tolerable hut.”17 By making art subordinate to life and its real demands, Chernyshevsky was telling the artist that his task is to fulfill the social needs of the moment—whatever these needs happen to be in the opinion of the critic. It is also clear that, if Chernyshevsky’s ideas are accepted, art is left without any independent value or stature.
The publication of Chernyshevsky’s thesis blew up a storm in the Russian periodical press, and a torrent of criticism hailed down on the head of the audacious young iconoclast. Even the mild-mannered and temperate Turgenev was incensed, and his letters show how disturbed he was at this heavy-handed assault on his artistic pieties. “I have not read anything for a long time that so upset me,” he writes to Kraevsky, who had printed a critical onslaught against the book in Notes of the Fatherland. “It is worse than an evil book; it is—an evil deed.”18 Dostoevsky would have been as much opposed to Chernyshevsky’s ideas, if not more so, than Turgenev, Tolstoy, and all the others who had spoken up with indignation. For Dostoevsky’s defense of the role of Christianity in art in his planned Letters on Art would also have met head-on the atheistic implications of Chernyshevsky’s rejection of “imagination.” This will indeed be an important thrust of the attack he will launch, in just a few years, on the Utilitarian aesthetics of the radicals.
It was against this background that Dostoevsky and his old friend Aleksey Pleshcheev began their exchange of letters just as the latter was on the point of departing for his first visit home from exile. “I will visit Nekrasov,” Pleshcheev remarks. “But if even one of them [the circle of The Contemporary] addresses me in a high-handed fashion—I will never set foot across his threshold again. Enough! The time is past when one bowed down to great men, who in fact turn out to be complete trash.”19 Nekrasov, he soon hastens to write to his friend, “spoke of you with much sympathy; and in general—he is a person, so it seems to me—really good.” Pleshcheev had written earlier that “Turgenev speaks of you with warm concern.”20
Dostoevsky soon learned, through his correspondence, of a new phase of Chernyshevsky’s campaign to undermine the prestige and spiritual authority of the gentry liberal intelligentsia. In this case, he singled out an unpretentious little story of Turgenev’s, “Asya,” and used it to launch a full-scale onslaught against the weakness of character displayed by the “superfluous man”—the cultivated, educated, Russian gentry liberal, filled with Western humanitarian ideas and dreaming of beneficence for mankind as a whole, but who invariably went down in defeat before the immense stagnation, inertia, and backwardness of Russian life. Such a character had been a favorite of Russian writers at least since Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin, and the main figure of “Asya,” a Russian dilettante idling in Europe, is a minor offshoot of this line.
Chernyshevsky’s article, entitled “A Russian at a Rendezvous,” is more a political diatribe than literary criticism. It dwells on the hesitations of Turgenev’s protagonist, the utter lack of resolution that Chernyshevsky sees as typical of a whole group of characters belonging to the gentry liberal intelligentsia portrayed by the same author. Although, writes Chernyshevsky, he was educated to believe that such people are the source of enlightenment in Russian society, “we are gradually beginning to come round to thinking that this opinion about him is an empty dream; we sense that we shall not long remain under its influence; that there are people better than he is, namely, those whom he wrongs” (all the other, socially inferior classes of Russian society, especially the raznochintsy).21
This gauntlet flung in the face of the moral-spiritual hegemony of the gentry liberal intelligentsia began a polemic that raged all through the 1860s and to which most of the important representatives of Russian literature made significant contributions. Turgenev’s On the Eve and Fathers and Children, Herzen’s The Superfluous Men and the Bilious, Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Tolstoy’s little-known comedy An Infected Family—all were products of this battle royal, whose opening round was signaled by Chernyshevsky’s article. At the end of the decade, the debate was magisterially terminated by Dostoevsky’s Demons.
All these works, however, remained to be written, and the only notable reply to Chernyshevsky was offered by Turgenev’s inseparable companion and alter ego, the critic Annenkov. In an article titled “The Weak Person as a Literary Type,” Annenkov did not attempt to argue with Chernyshevsky; rather, he analyzed the problem of why the weak person had become such an important figure in Russian literature. The so-called solid (tsel’ny) characters in Russia, he writes—those who act instinctively and spontaneously—always seem to give free rein to the worst and most egoistic aspects of human nature. The weak person in Russian culture, Annenkov argues, has been made so because he is burdened with the enlightened values of humanity and civilization and is morally torn by the problem of attempting to live up to them. “Education endowed him with the capacity promptly to understand suffering in all its aspects, and to experience within himself the misfortune and unhappiness of others. Hence his role as the representative of the deprived, unjustly offended, and the downtrodden; this requires even more than the simple feeling of compassion, it requires a sharp-sighted and humane intuition.”22
It may be assumed that Dostoevsky was familiar with this exchange, whose numerous echoes filled the pages of the literary journals of the time, and all the more so since it involved an issue in which he had a keen personal interest. Had he not, in “The Landlady,” portrayed the relation between “strong” and “weak” characters and given it a wide-ranging significance for Russian culture? Dostoevsky’s weak characters can be considered a plebeian variation of the same literary type, and their inner impotence illustrates the same dilemma. It may well have been Annenkov’s article that helped Dostoevsky understand some of the larger implications of his own earlier writings. For we find him, approximately a year later, stressing the importance of The Double in terms that indicate a new awareness of its social-cultural ramifications. One of his projects for raising money was to revise this novella for a republication. “Why lose a remarkable idea,” he writes Mikhail, “whose social value is considerable, that I was the first to discover and of which I was the herald.”23 Evidently, Dostoevsky now viewed himself as having created a character type (the weak and indecisive Golyadkin) whose importance as a symbolic figure in Russian culture had only recently begun to be fully appreciated.
1 Cited in Leonid Grossman, “Grazhdanskaya smert F. M. Dostoevskogo,” LN 22–24 (Moscow, 1935), 688–689.
2 Pis’ma, 1: 165; January 18, 1856.
3 Ibid., 166.
4 Ibid.
5 Cited in A. A. Kornilov, Obshchestvenoe dvizhenie pri Aleksandre II (Moscow, 1909), 6.
6 Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy (London, 1975), 587.
7 See Raoul Labry, Alexandre Ivanovic Herzen, 1812–1870 (Paris, 1928), 356.
8 Pis’ma, 1: 166–167.
9 Ibid., 167.
10 Ibid.
11 I. I. Panaev, Sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols. (Moscow, 1912), 5: 1–11.
12 “Pis’ma A. N. Pleshcheeva k F. M. Dostoevskomu,” in DMI.
13 In the definitive dictionary of the Russian literary language, the first reference given for this word in the sense of “slipping away unobserved, to disappear” is a citation from Dostoevsky’s The Double. Slovar sovremennogo Russkogo literaturn
ogo yazika, 17 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1950–1965), 14: 1116.
14 K. Chukovsky, “Dostoevsky i Pleyada Belinskogo,” in N. A. Nekrasov: stati i materialy (Leningrad, 1926), 352.
15 Pis’ma, 1: 159; August 21, 1855.
16 Abbott Gleason applies to Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov the words used by Nicolas Berdyaev to characterize Russian Nihilism in general. Nihilism, Berdyaev wrote, “grew up on the spiritual soil of Orthodoxy; it could appear only in a soul which was cast in an Orthodox mold. It was Orthodox asceticism turned inside out, and asceticism without Grace. At the base of Russian Nihilism, when grasped in its purity and depth, lies the Orthodox rejection of the world, its sense of the truth that ‘the whole world lieth in wickedness,’ the acknowledgement of the sinfulness of all riches and luxury, of all creative profusion in art and thought. . . . Nihilism considers as sinful luxury not only art, metaphysics and spiritual values, but religion also.” See Nicholas Berdyaev, The Origins of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor, MI, 1960), 45, cited in Abbott Gleason, Young Russia (New York, 1980), 103.
17 N. G. Chernyshevsky, Selected Philosophical Essays (Moscow, 1953), 318.
18 Cited in V. Evgeniyev-Maximov, Sovremennik pri Chernyshevskom i Dobrolyubove (Leningrad, 1936), 21.
19 DMI, 440–441; May 30, 1858.
20 Ibid., 439; April 10, 1858.
21 N. G. Chernyshevsky, Izbrannye filosofskie sochineniya, 3 vols. (Leningrad, 1950–1951), 2: 235–236.
22 P. V. Annenkov, Vospominaniya i kriticheskie ocherki, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1879), 2: 164, 167.
23 Pis’ma, 1: 257; October 1, 1859.
CHAPTER 19
The Siberian Novellas
Once Dostoevsky had received his commission as an officer in March 1857, and once his rights as a nobleman had been restored in May 1857, we hear no more about his Letters on Art. Instead, all his energies are now concentrated on the various projects for novels and stories on which he had never ceased to work in the three years since his release from the prison camp, despite the demands of his military duties and the stultifying aftermaths of his epileptic seizures. He still did not know whether he had regained the right to publish, but his correspondents assured him that such a right was implicitly included in those he had been accorded. Since other returning Petrashevtsy had begun to appear in print, Dostoevsky decided to publish, at first without signature, and to see whether this would provoke any reaction from the authorities.
The only work immediately available was the story he had completed in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress, “A Little Hero,” which was published in the August 1857 issue of Notes of the Fatherland. That summer, Dostoevsky’s literary efforts were concentrated on work that, as he tells Evgeny Yakushkin, was “as bulky as a novel of Dickens” and had occupied him for about a year and a half. Dostoevsky speaks of a plan containing three books, but “only the first book has been written in 5 parts” and he promises to now “start to polish it by sections and send the sections to you.”1 He asks Yakushkin to inquire among editors in Petersburg if they would be interested in the first volume and how much they would pay.
From a letter to Mikhail a few months later, it is clear that Dostoevsky had hoped to publish in installments as these were completed, but that Mikhail advised him to hurry up and complete whatever he was then writing. “Seeing that my novel is taking on huge proportions,” Dostoevsky writes, “that it was turning out excellently, and that it was necessary, absolutely necessary (for money) to terminate it quickly—I began to hesitate. Nothing is sadder than such hesitation in the midst of work. Eagerness, will, energy—all sputter out.” As a result, Dostoevsky informs his brother that “the whole novel with all its material is now packed in the trunk.”2
All notions of writing a novel of any kind had been abandoned by the beginning of the new year because Dostoevsky decided to write shorter works that would bring immediate returns. He had received an advance from a planned new journal, The Russian Word (Russkoe Slovo), for such a short work. Encouraged, Dostoevsky then wrote to Mikhail Katkov, the editor of a relatively new journal, The Russian Messenger (Russky Vestnik), asking for an advance and proposing his major novel as bait. Although he had no intention of writing this novel, he considered that a substantial story would satisfy his obligations. Katkov promptly sent the money, accompanied by an encouraging letter, and Dostoevsky was now committed to writing two shorter works in the immediate future. “As for my novel,” he writes his brother several months later, “I will only get down to it on my return to Russia. . . . It contains . . . a new character . . . without doubt actually very common in Russia in real life. . . . [I]f one is to judge by the tendency and ideas everybody is filled with, I am certain that, once back in Russia, I will enrich my new novel with new observations.”3
The words “idea” and “character” are inseparable for Dostoevsky, and he uses them interchangeably. Such a character would incarnate the social-cultural tendencies of this period of ferment in Russian life, just on the eve of the liberation of the serfs, and as the country was emerging from its long stagnation under Nicholas I. Dostoevsky had thus already begun to adopt the explicitly “ideological” orientation of all his best post-Siberian creations, and to envisage his creative aim as being the embodiment of character types representative of these burgeoning tendencies and currents. His early work had also been conceived in terms of the dominating ideas of the 1840s, but such ideas had already been embodied in a standard repertory of Gogolian figures (the chinovnik, the romantic dreamer), which Dostoevsky simply took over and used for his own purposes. Henceforth he would see his creative task as the depiction of types not yet observed by others or still in the process of formation.
Although Dostoevsky put aside his plans for a major novel, he did write his two shorter works—the Siberian novellas Uncle’s Dream (Dyadyushkin son) and The Village of Stepanchikovo (Selo Stepanchikovo). Dostoevsky had hoped to send Uncle’s Dream to The Russian Word by September 1858, and he apologizes to his brother, who had negotiated the advance, with the explanation that his illness had kept him from his desk. “Last month I had four attacks, which had never happened before—and I almost did not work at all. After my attacks I . . . feel completely crushed.”4 Also, work on Uncle’s Dream was difficult because Dostoevsky wrote it with inner distaste. “I don’t like it, and it saddens me that I am forced to appear in public again so miserably. . . . You can’t write what you want to write, and you write something that you wouldn’t even want to think about if you didn’t need money. . . . Being a needy writer is a filthy trade.”5 Uncle’s Dream had probably been part of the “comic novel” that he had worked on with so much pleasure, but which now had become a burden. “I would be happy to do better,” he writes Mikhail, “but all the ideas in my head are for large works.”6 Nevertheless, it was sent off in mid-December and published in the spring (March 1859) in The Russian Word.
At first, Dostoevsky’s attitude toward The Village of Stepanchikovo was as resentful as toward Uncle’s Dream. “The story that I am writing for Katkov,” he tells Mikhail, “displeases me very much and goes against the grain. But I have . . . to pay back a debt.”7 By the time he had sent off three-quarters of the manuscript, though, his opinion had swung round full circle. “Listen, Misha!” he admonishes his brother, “the novel, of course, has very great defects, . . . but what I am as sure of as an axiom is that, at the same time, it has the greatest qualities and is my best work. . . . I base all my hopes on it, and, even more, the consolidation of my literary reputation.”8 To his dismay, Katkov flatly rejected the work and asked the author to return his advance payment; but Dostoevsky did not lose faith in his creation. “There are,” he tells his brother, “scenes of high comedy that Gogol would have signed without hesitation.”9
The two brothers offered the work to Nekrasov, who had earlier offered through Mikhail to send Dostoevsky an advance if he were in financial straits. Even though Dostoevsky was still smarting from the wounds inflicted by The Contemporary, Katkov’s rejectio
n left him no recourse but to seize on what seemed the most likely chance to obtain funds immediately. Nekrasov was handed the manuscript in the first days of September 1859 and hesitated over a month before coming to a decision—a month during which Dostoevsky, on tenterhooks in Semipalatinsk, kept urging his brother to prod the editor. “Note all the particulars and all his words, and, I implore you for God’s sake, write me about it in as much detail as you can.”10
Dostoevsky’s novella contained parodistic thrusts against the Natural School of the 1840s—and thus implicitly against Belinsky—which Nekrasov (not to mention Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov) would have found offensive. No wonder he waited on tenterhooks! To make matters worse, these thrusts included a reference to one of Nekrasov’s own poems, “When from dark error’s subjugation,” which Dostoevsky will use at greater length in the epigraph to Notes from Underground. In The Village of Stepanchikovo, he cites the poem ironically, using it to criticize the humanitarianism of the Natural School as containing a latent self-complacency, an implicit posture of superiority to and patronage of the “fallen,” who must be “sought out and raised up.”