Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  1 A. A. Belkin, ed., F. M. Dostoevsky v Russkoi kritike (Moscow, 1956), 42.

  2 I. I. Zamotin, Dostoevsky v Russkoi kritike, 1848–1881 (Warsaw, 1913), 36–37.

  3 Cited in PSS, 3: 529.

  4 Belkin, Dostoevsky v Russkoi kritike, 94–95.

  5 K. Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton, NJ, 1967), 210.

  6 Nietzsche read The Insulted and Injured with great appreciation. Indeed, according to an account given by a friend, he told her that he had perused it with “his eyes overflowing” with tears. The formidable Nietzsche surrendered completely to Dostoevsky’s efforts to pluck the heartstrings of his readers. As Wolfgang Gesemann has suggested, the German philosopher may also have been intrigued by Dostoevsky’s attack against the sentimental idealism of the “schöne Seele,” as well as “the excitement of the encounter with the creatively genial refinement of Stirnerism” in Prince Valkovsky. See Gesemann, “Nietzsche’s Verhältnnis zu Dostoevsky auf dem europäischen Hintergrund der 80er Jahre,” Die Welt der Slaven 2 (July 1961), 135, 147–150.

  7 George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (New York, 1961), 197.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Era of Proclamations

  The one or two years following the liberation of the serfs on February 16, 1861 are known by Russian historians as “the era of proclamations.” For the first time since the Decembrist uprising in 1825, open agitation was carried on against the regime in the streets of Petersburg and Moscow. Inflammatory leaflets turned up everywhere—not only on doorhandles and in mailboxes but also lying scattered along main streets such as the Nevsky Prospect. The sheer fact of their appearance was a highly significant and unprecedented event—not to mention the boldness of those who wrote and distributed them. The sudden explosion of this propaganda campaign revealed the rancorous discontent of the radical intelligentsia with the tsar whom, just a few years before, they had been hailing in adulatory terms for his intention to bring an end to serfdom.

  Even before the issuance of the liberation decree, the radical progressives had become convinced that the economic terms proposed would, in the long run, lead to the impoverishment of the peasantry. The peasants themselves were simply bewildered by the complicated terms of the manifesto, which, of course, most of them could not read, and rumors swept the vast countryside that the “true liberation” supposedly proclaimed by the tsar was being concealed by the rapacious landed gentry. Literate peasants, who set up as “interpreters” (in the sense desired by the people) of the floridly written and ambiguous liberation decree, gained a wide following among credulous listeners only too willing to believe in the treachery and mendacity of their overlords. Such a “true liberation” had long been cherished in the apocalyptic imagination of the Russian peasants, who dreamed that they would be granted, without repayment, all the land they deemed to be their own—“mainly,” writes Franco Venturi, “the complete separation of their community from the landlord, the breaking of all ties between them, and hence the obshchina closing in on itself.”1

  Refusal to obey the local authorities occurred in several districts, and the most widespread disorder took place in the small village of Bezdna in the province of Kazan. Here, a raskolnik named Anton Petrov acquired an immense authority over the peasantry of the region when, on the basis of an aberrant reading of the manifesto supposedly inspired by divine illumination, he proclaimed the “true liberation,” which pretended to disclose the genuine intentions of the holy tsar. Troops were finally sent in during April 1861 to arrest the agitator, who was telling the peasants not to comply with any of their obligations to the landowners, and when his followers refused to surrender him, several salvos were fired into the unarmed and peaceful mass. The official casualty figures listed fifty-one dead and seventy-seven wounded, but word-of-mouth reports spoke of several hundred casualties. A requiem mass for the peasants killed at Bezdna was organized in nearby Kazan by the students of the university and the Ecclesiastical Academy, and a popular young clergyman who taught history at the academy made a speech declaring Anton Petrov to have been “a new prophet . . . and he too has proclaimed liberty in the name of God.”2

  This clergyman, Afanasy Prokofievich Shchapov by name, had already achieved some notoriety for a Slavophil interpretation of the religious schism in the Russian Church. He depicted the schismatics as a native form of defiance against the imposition of foreign customs and ideas; and when the raskolniki rejected the alien state reforms imposed by Peter the Great, even declaring the tsar himself to be nothing less than the dreaded Antichrist, Shchapov considered such a reaction to be a struggle for cultural independence. Tried for his subversive speech at the Kazan service, he was sentenced to confinement in a monastery, but Alexander II intervened and ordered Shchapov to be given a post in the branch of the Ministry of Internal Affairs dealing with relations with the Old Believers.

  A year later he issued his most important work, The Land and the Schism, the second part of which was published in Time. Much of this text was devoted to the sect of the Beguny (“Runners” or “Wanderers”), whose beliefs Shchapov interpreted as a form of social protest. The Beguny refused to carry an internal passport, as required by law, because they believed the world to be ruled by Antichrist, and they wandered through the Russian land as wayfarers, stubbornly rejecting all the obligations imposed on them by the godless state. Shchapov’s theories certainly contributed their share to Dostoevsky’s own assessment of the dissenting sects, and he sought in their heretical theology an insight into the indigenous essence of the Russian folk character. A bill from a bookstore dated August 1862 shows him to have ordered, among many other works, five books on the Raskol, including the major historical study by Shchapov.3

  Three months after the fusillade at Bezdna, the first leaflet of what was to become a veritable blizzard made its appearance in Petersburg and then in Moscow. Called The Great Russian and moderate in tone, it was inspired by the fears aroused by events in Bezdna and elsewhere in the countryside and was addressed to the educated classes. “The government is bringing Russia to a Pugachev revolt,” declared the first issue.4 The government, it was suggested, should pay the redemption fees for the land allotted to the peasants, and at the same time free the nationalities of the Russian Empire. A national assembly should also be convened to help the tsar come into more direct contact with the nation as a whole. The authors of The Great Russian remain unknown, but the suspects all belong to the circle of students and young army officers grouped around Chernyshevsky and The Contemporary. V. A. Obruchev, an ex-officer who had joined the staff of The Contemporary, was caught distributing the leaflet and was sent to Siberia for a number of years.

  Simultaneously with the second and third numbers of The Great Russian, which circulated in the fall of 1861, another proclamation appeared, entitled To the Young Generation. Its author is now known to be N. V. Shelgunov, who also contributed social-economic articles to The Contemporary. The leaflet was revised by M. L. Mikhailov, who had gained fame as a defender of woman’s rights in the pages of The Contemporary, and Herzen printed it in London, with considerable reluctance and foreboding, at his Free Russian Press. Mikhailov, already under surveillance, was arrested on September 14, 1861, and his sentence to Siberia for six years produced a widespread wave of indignation.

  To the Young Generation was only one of a series of leaflets written by Mikhailov, Shelgunov, and perhaps Chernyshevsky (the others, addressed to peasants and soldiers, were never printed), and it took a much harsher line than the moderate The Great Russian. No question now remained that a political change was envisaged, and that the authors had broken with tsarism once and for all: “We do not need a power that oppresses us; we do not need a power that prevents the mental, civic, and economic development of the country; we do not need a power that raises corruption and self-seeking as its banner.” What Russia needs is “an elected leader receiving a salary for his services,” and Alexander II should be told that the greatest ac
hievement of his reign—the liberation of the serfs—had created a new order in which he had become superfluous: “If Alexander does not understand this and does not wish voluntarily to make way for the people—so much the worse for him.” The general dissatisfaction can still be kept within bounds if the tsar gives up the throne; but “if to achieve our ends, by dividing the land among the people, we have to kill a hundred thousand of the gentry, even that will not deter us.”5

  Noticeable in To the Young Generation is the strong influence of Herzen’s “Russian Socialism,” with its messianic vision of a social-political future for Russia without precedent in the history of Europe. “We believe in the forces of Russia because we believe that we have been destined to bring a new principle into history, to hand on our own message and not to haunt the old gardens of Europe.”6 A full democracy was envisaged; all land belonging to the nation would be divided into obshchinas; everyone would be a member of a self-administered commune, and whether a state of any kind would continue to exist is left unclear. The leaflet attacks “constitutionalism” and “economists” who desire “to turn Russia into England and impregnate us with English maturity.” “We have aped,” the leaflet declares, “the French and Germans quite enough. Do we need to ape the English as well?”7 Dostoevsky mentions To the Young Generation by name and was certainly familiar with its contents.

  After the events at Bezdna and their aftermaths, the government tightened restrictions in all areas where they had been relaxed in recent years. Nowhere had they been more liberal than in the universities, where limitations on admission had been lifted and lectures were thrown open to all who wished to attend. Students had also acquired the right to set up their own libraries, establish mutual-aid funds, publish newspapers, and run their own affairs. New regulations drawn up for the universities abolished all the corporate liberties of the students and reimposed fees that had been eliminated for the poorer ones just a few years earlier. These regulations were installed at the beginning of the fall term; but the students refused to accept them, and, to the unfeigned delight of a large crowd of onlookers, organized a protest march through the streets despite the presence of police and army troops. Many were arrested the same night, other arrests followed later, and, when agitation continued, the universities were closed for a full year. A number of the students who participated in these events later became well-known in the ranks of the Russian revolutionary movement.

  The sympathies of most of the intelligentsia, including Feodor and Mikhail Dostoevsky, were on the side of the students. When those arrested were incarcerated in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress, Dostoevsky surely recalled his own long months of solitary confinement in the same forbidding prison. But the students were not suspected of any criminal political conspiracy, visitors could come and go, and gifts from well-wishers poured in to make their lot more comfortable. A large slab of beef was grilled in the apartment of Mikhail Dostoevsky and sent, along with bottles of cognac and red wine, in the name of “the editorial bureau of Time,” thus giving a public declaration of the liberalism of the periodical.8

  By the fall of 1861, Dostoevsky had already published several installments of House of the Dead, and these sketches provided the Russian public with its first terrifying image of what lay ahead for those sentenced for a political crime. “At that time we knew about Siberia through Notes from the House of the Dead,” wrote Shelgunov years later, “and this, of course, was quite enough to make us fear for the fate of Mikhailov.”9 No writer was now more celebrated than Dostoevsky, whose name was surrounded with the halo of his former suffering and whose sketches only served to enhance his prestige as a precursor on the path of political martyrdom that so many members of the younger generation might be forced to tread themselves. He was often asked to read from his works by student groups and for the benefit of worthy causes, and he invariably accepted such invitations because he believed it of first importance to keep in touch with his potential readers. As his fame increased, he also hoped that it might be possible to exercise some influence on public opinion.

  Nothing untoward occurred at the various benefits in which Dostoevsky participated up through the spring of 1862; but matters took a different turn at a sensational “literary-musical evening” on March 2, which took place before an excitable crowd of three thousand people. The event, which Dostoevsky later enshrined in the masterly fête scene of Demons, was organized on behalf of the Literary Fund to help needy students. However, everyone knew, as Shelgunov wrote in his memoirs, that among the “needy students” for whom the flower of the cultured public wished to raise money were Mikhailov and Obruchev,10 and the social-political character of the evening was accentuated by other details.

  The literati invited to participate were all of a progressive or radical complexion: Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov, V. S. Kurochkin, editor of the radical satirical journal The Spark (Iskra)—and a Professor Pavlov, initiator of the Sunday-school movement, whose favorite slogan, “La révolution par l’école,” was being taken quite literally by some teachers, who used the classroom to indoctrinate their pupils in favor of atheism and subversion. Henrik Wienawski, Anton Rubinstein, and the leading soprano of the Italian opera had agreed to take charge of the musical interludes—and if Rubinstein played his piano transcription of Beethoven’s The Ruins of Athens (1811) it was because this work, as was well known, had been composed in honor of the Greek revolt against the Turkish Empire.

  Dostoevsky opened the program, and he read from some still unpublished chapters of House of the Dead describing the death of a soldier from consumption in the prison hospital. The name of this soldier also turned out to be Mikhailov, and the death scene is embellished with those Dickensian details that Dostoevsky loved to employ. He dwelled on the emaciated body of the twenty-five-year-old, and the iron fetters that prison regulations would not allow to be removed. The grizzled sentry summoned to carry out the corpse is so moved by the piteous sight that he takes off his helmet and sword belt and crosses himself. One can well imagine the moving effect of this passage, with its constant repetition of the name, on those many people who knew the other Mikhailov well and were filled with ominous premonitions about his future.

  Yet the audience response to Dostoevsky was as nothing compared to the veritable hurricane aroused by the intervention of Professor Pavlov, who had announced a lecture titled “A Thousand Years of Russian History.” The millennium of Russia had been celebrated that very year with a great display of official pomp, and Pavlov’s speech, duly submitted to the censorship, had been approved for delivery. But the nervous and highly volatile Pavlov, who is mentioned in the memoirs of the left-wing L. F. Panteleev as “not a completely normal person,”11 whipped the audience into hysteria by his manner of delivery. Speaking in a quavering voice that sometimes rose to a shriek, he accentuated the words of his text so as to turn them into an implacable indictment of Russian history under its thousand years of autocratic rule. Shelgunov provides his firsthand report: “In the hall one could hear a growing rumble, there were shouts of furious exhilaration, seats were rattled, heels were pounded. I was sitting on the platform with others, among them Nekrasov, awaiting his turn. The agitated E. P. Kovalevsky [the president of the Literary Fund] ran up, and, turning to us, said: ‘Stop him! Stop him! Tomorrow he’ll be sent away!’ But it was impossible to get Pavlov off the platform; more and more carried away, he finished his talk amidst the deafening shouts of the public and left the platform.”12 The audience had been worked up to an indescribable pitch of enthusiasm, and the applause was not only ear-shattering but climaxed by a ringing chorus of the Marsellaise. Kovalevsky’s prediction proved correct: the next day Pavlov was sent into provincial exile and allowed to return to the capital only several years later.

  Unlike Dostoevsky’s fête scene, which terminates in pandemonium, the audience in the hall eventually calmed down, and the evening ended with a rousing version of Glinka’s “Kamarinskaya,” a symbol of peasant earthiness and self-assertion. So
many encores were requested that a well-bred agent of the secret police, in his report, indignantly commented on the “indelicacy” of dragging out the evening for so long that ladies had been pinned to their seats for seven hours.13

  As a protest against Pavlov’s exile, Petersburg students now boycotted the informal courses organized by faculty to replace the regular classes. Professors were asked to join the movement by canceling their lectures, and those who refused were mercilessly harassed. The authorities themselves finally decided to terminate the de facto university, which had been given permission to use certain official buildings for its courses. “The reason for the destruction of the [free] university,” Strakhov wrote nineteen years later, “was the famous ‘literary-musical evening.’ . . . The noise and enthusiasm were enormous, and it has always seemed to me since that the evening was the highest point reached by the liberal movement of our society, as well as the culmination of our cloud-castle revolution.”14 After this scandalous demonstration, Strakhov explains, it became clear that “every liberal measure aroused a movement in society that used such a measure for its own ends, which were not liberal at all but entirely radical.”15 This is the conclusion that Dostoevsky also began to draw, but rather than joining in the hue and cry against the radicals, he urgently tried to warn them against the consequences of their own folly.

  Historians do not agree with Strakhov’s judgment that the literary-musical evening was the highest crest reached by the pounding wave of social-political unrest during the spring of 1862. The true peak of the era of proclamations arrived two months later, in mid-May, when a leaflet entitled Young Russia was circulated. It is this remarkable document that brought the revolutionary ferment of the time to its convulsive climax.

  The tsarist authorities never discovered that its author was a twenty-year-old youth, P. G. Zaichnevsky, who already had acquired a considerable underground past despite his tender years. On entering the University of Moscow in 1859, his first move had been to set up a clandestine printing press and publish works by Herzen, Ogarev, Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity), and Büchner (Force and Matter). Making no secret of his radical sympathies, he attempted to organize peasant resistance to the terms of the liberation during the summer of 1861, and he was arrested after proclaiming his revolutionary ideas in a letter intercepted by the secret police. All the same, Zaichnevsky enjoyed the same astonishingly lax conditions of imprisonment in Moscow as had been accorded the Petersburg students. Friends could bring books, magazines, and newspapers (some of them illegal) to keep him in touch with the political scene. Zaichnevsky wrote the proclamation in his cell with the help of a small group of friends, all regular visitors, who had taken part in Moscow student demonstrations in the autumn of 1861. The manuscript, smuggled out with the help of a guard, was printed by Zaichnevsky’s comrades on their own press, and they made Petersburg the center of distribution so as to divert attention from the real source.