Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Turgenev had carefully studied the writings in which the new generation expressed its contemptuous rejection of the old, and he drew on the ideas he found there with remarkable precision. All the social-cultural issues of the day are reflected so accurately in the book that one Soviet Russian critic has rightly called it “a lapidary artistic chronicle of contemporary life.”7 Nonetheless, the shading that Turgenev gave to these issues was determined by his own artistic aims and ambiguous attitudes; like Dostoevsky, he could simultaneously sympathize with the ardent moral fervor of the young, deplore their intemperance, detest their ideas, and lament over their fate. Many of the positions that Bazarov advocates are not so much echoes of The Contemporary as subtle deformations and exaggerations calculated to reveal their ultimate implications and thus their dangerous potentialities. It is hardly surprising that partisans of these ideas should have found Turgenev’s rendition unacceptable; much more unexpected is that even one radical spokesman should have proclaimed Bazarov to be the beacon lighting up the path to the future.

  Fathers and Children inaugurates what will become the dominant theme of the Russian novel of the 1860s: the conflict between the narrow rationalism and materialism upheld by this new generation and all those “irrational” feelings and values whose reality they refuse to acknowledge. But if Turgenev exposes the shortcomings of the worldview of the raznochintsy in this way, he nonetheless delineates Bazarov as someone far superior in energy, force of character, and promise for the future to any of the gentry characters by whom he is surrounded. Both of the older Kirsanovs (the father and uncle of Arkady, Bazarov’s gentry liberal friend) are clearly relics of the past. Unable to cope with the new Russian society on the point of bursting its old bounds, Arkady and his father flourish in contented mediocrity on their estate, but the towering image of the rebellious Bazarov definitely places their “family happiness” (to use a Tolstoyan tag) in the shade. “Your sort, you gentry,” Bazarov tells Arkady, when the two friends come to the parting of the ways, “can never get beyond refined submission or refined indignation, and that’s a mere trifle. You won’t fight . . . but we mean to fight . . . we want to smash other people!” (8: 380)

  18. I. S. Turgenev, ca. 1865. From Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 9 (Moscow–Leningrad, 1965)

  All through the novel, Turgenev’s portrait of the relations between the two generations deftly captures the full range of the opposition that had been building up both in personal contacts and in journalistic exchanges, and his delineation of this conflict sets the ideological terms in which the polemics of the immediate future would be carried on. The obsolescence of the older generation is revealed by Nikolay Kirsanov’s fondness for Pushkin and his amateur efforts on the violoncello. “It’s time to throw up that rubbish,” Bazarov says, referring to Pushkin, and he counsels Arkady to give his father “something sensible to read.” The two friends condescendingly decide that Büchner’s Force and Matter would be suitable as an introduction to more serious intellectual fare because it “is written in popular language” (8: 239).

  Bazarov’s attack against art is carried on vigorously and, for an informed reader of that time, with obvious reference to Chernyshevsky’s thesis. But while Chernyshevsky had merely argued that art should be subordinate to life, and had not denied it a certain secondary usefulness, Turgenev pushes the opposition between the “aesthetic” and the “useful” into a total negation. When Arkady’s uncle Pavel Petrovich complains that young Russian artists regard “Raphael as a fool,” Bazarov retorts, “To my mind, Raphael’s not worth a brass farthing; and they are no better than he” (8: 247). No distinction is made between different kinds of art as more or less useful, and another remark of Bazarov illustrates the point with epigrammatic terseness: “A good chemist is twenty times as useful as any poet” (8: 219).

  Bazarov evidently exemplifies Chernyshevsky’s conviction that the physical sciences, with their theory of a universal material determinism, furnish the basis for a solution to all problems, including those of a moral-social nature. But this faith in science, which still implies a belief in general principles of some sort, is then splintered by Bazarov into particular sciences. “There are sciences,” he declares, “as there are trades and vocations; but abstract science doesn’t exist at all” (8: 219). Ultimately, even science itself becomes reduced to “sensations,” and it is these, in all their infinite variety, that have the last word. “There are no general principles—you’ve not made even that out as yet!” Bazarov exclaims to Arkady with some astonishment. “There are feelings. . . . Why do I like chemistry? Why do you like apples?—also by virtue of our sensations.” The “feelings” referred to by Bazarov are purely physical sensations, not psychic or emotive ones, and Bazarov insists that “men will never penetrate deeper than that” (8: 325). Chernyshevsky’s scientism thus ends up as a solipsistic empiricism or sensationalism in which all general principles or values are dissolved (much as in Max Stirner) into a matter of individual taste or preference.

  It is this attack on all general principles that forms the basis of what Turgenev labels Bazarov’s “Nihilism”—a term that had just come into usage in connection with the radicals and was destined, as a result of Turgenev’s novel, to a great career. A Nihilist, Arkady eagerly explains, “is a man who does not bow before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence for that principle may be enshrined in” (8: 216). In the most famous passage in the book, Bazarov explains the universal scope of this rejection to the incredulous elder Kirsanovs:

  “Allow me though,” began Nikolay Petrovich. “You deny everything, or, speaking more precisely, you destroy everything. . . . But one must construct too, you know?”

  “That’s not our business now. . . . The ground has to be cleared first” (8: 243).

  To be sure, Arkady immediately leaps in to say that “the present condition of the people requires it”—thus linking such negation with the aim of a revolutionary social transformation. But this distant aim, so far as Bazarov is concerned, remains clearly subordinate to the work of negation and destruction, to a personal emancipation from all inherited principles and prejudices and the encouragement of such emancipation among others. Turgenev here thus reverses the actual order of priorities among the followers of The Contemporary, whose goals were much more social-political than personal. Very probably, though, he had already become aware of another radical current in the essays of Pisarev and other contributors to the Russian Word, who, as Strakhov had noted, put a much stronger accent on self-assertion and self-liberation and whose philosophical preferences were in fact quite close to Bazarov’s “sensationalistic” empiricism.

  Bazarov’s attitude toward “the people” is also a mixture of conflicting ideas that, without representing any single prevalent point of view, finally again puts the emphasis on a solitary individualism. On the one hand, he is proud of his plebian origins, and when Pavel Petrovich, shocked at his utterances, accuses him of not being “Russian,” he replies, “My grandfather ploughed the land” (8: 244), and points out that the peasants feel more at home with him than with the gentry. But he is also an inflexible Westernizer who refuses to idealize the peasants and ridicules their backwardness and superstition. Even that holy of holies, the village obshchina, does not escape the lash of Bazarov’s iconoclasm, and in this he reflects not only the opinion of his creator, the Western liberal Turgenev, but also a viewpoint just beginning to make its appearance in The Russian Word.8

  No scene in Fathers and Children is more prophetic than the one in which Turgenev brilliantly dramatizes all the ambiguities of Bazarov’s love-hate relation to the people—the internal clash between his self-assertive ideas, which express an aching need for personal self-fulfillment, and the obligation imposed by history on his generation to devote their lives to bettering the lot of the backward peasantry. Bazarov recalls that once, while walking past the izba of a prosperous peasant, Arkady had piously remarked that Russia would “atta
in perfection when the poorest peasant had a [clean and comfortable] hut” and that “every one of us ought to work to bring [that] about.” Such an obligation impels Bazarov to confess to a feeling of intense “hatred for this poorest peasant, this Philip or Sidor, for whom I’m ready to jump out of my skin, and who won’t even thank me for it . . . and what do I need his thanks for? Why, suppose he does live in a clean hut, while nettles are growing out of me—well, what then?” (8: 325).

  Turgenev penetrates here, with consummate insight, to the anguishing dilemma of the young Russian radical of the 1860s, heart and soul dedicated to serving a people from whom he is totally alienated by his culture—a people on whose behalf he must surrender all claims to happiness, and yet who cannot even understand the nature or meaning of his self-sacrifice. Such an awareness of the tragic isolation of the intelligentsia—an isolation that had been one of Dostoevsky’s most shocking discoveries during his years in the Siberian prison camp—had hardly been fully grasped yet as an objective datum of the Russian social-cultural situation. It was to become much more widespread in the next few years, partly because the people did not behave in the manner that the intelligentsia had anticipated, partly because Turgenev had raised the issue to the level of consciousness. As a result, Bazarov’s sense of indomitable will and strength as an individual, as well as his realization that he stands alone above and beyond the people, will come to the foreground and shape the guiding attitudes of the raznochintsy intelligentsia throughout the remainder of the 1860s.

  Even before the publication of Fathers and Children, rumors had been making the rounds in Petersburg that Turgenev’s new novel was a revengeful lampoon of Dobrolyubov. Chernyshevsky continued to believe this to his dying day and repeated the accusation as late as 1884.9 Depending on how the text was read, it could be taken either as an “apotheosis” of Bazarov (to cite the scandalized reaction of Katkov)10 or as a condemnation and exposure of the type he incarnated. The second view was that of a majority of readers, and is echoed in a report of the secret police surveying the cultural scene in 1862 with a good deal of perspicacity: “With this work . . . Turgenev branded our adolescent revolutionaries with the caustic name of ‘Nihilists,’ and shook the doctrine of materialism and its representatives.”11 To make certain that Turgenev would receive the proper chastisement for his audacity, Chernyshevsky entrusted the review of the novel to the twenty-two-year-old M. A. Antonovich, a protégé of Dobrolyubov known for his belligerence.

  Antonovich’s essay, “The Asmodeus of Our Time,” is not so much an article about Turgenev’s novel as a headlong onslaught intended to destroy whatever credit it might be given as a picture of the aims and ideal of the young generation. Most of the article is devoted to defaming Turgenev by every possible means. Whatever the justice of some of his remarks concerning Bazarov, they are drowned in the flood of abuse that made Antonovich’s article a synonym for critical malpractice.

  Quite opposite was the reaction of Dimitry Pisarev, the chief critic of The Russian Word, a journal that had been considered a staunch ally of The Contemporary. Strakhov noted in the young critic a tendency to draw the most extreme conclusions from the lessons of Chernyshevsky—the very same “Nihilist” conclusions that Bazarov would soon be proclaiming in Turgenev’s pages. Pisarev naturally found Turgenev’s hero completely to his taste, and he welcomed precisely those aspects of Bazarov considered defamatory by Antonovich as distinctive of the new “hero of our time.” Pavel Petrovich once refers to Bazarov as possessing a “satanic pride,” and Pisarev hastens to agree that “this expression is very felicitously chosen and is a perfect characterization of our hero.”12 Bazarov also trumpets a worldview based on an “empiricism” that reduces all matters of principle to individual preference, and Pisarev blithely accepts such a doctrine as the very last word of “science.” “Thus Bazarov everywhere and in everything does only what he wishes, or what seems to him useful and attractive. He is governed only by personal caprice or personal calculation. Neither over him, nor outside him, nor inside him does he recognize any regulator, any moral law, any principle. . . . Nothing except personal taste prevents him from murdering and robbing, and nothing except personal taste stirs people of this stripe to make discoveries in the field of science and social existence.”13 Three years later, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment will show what might occur when this interpretation of the Bazarov type is admiringly put to the test.

  All through Pisarev’s article, particular stress is placed on Bazarov’s grandeur as an individual, who towers not only above all other member of the educated class but even more above the people. As a result, Pisarev is sensitive to Bazarov’s moral-spiritual isolation and even casts it in the form of a universal social law:

  The masses, in every period, have lived contentedly, and with their inherent placidity have been satisfied with what was at hand. . . . This mass does not make discoveries or commit crimes; other people think and suffer, search and find, struggle and err on its behalf—other people eternally alien to it, eternally regarding it with contempt, and at the same time eternally working to increase the amenities of its life.14

  Nothing similar can be found in The Contemporary, where the intelligentsia and the people were invariably considered to be united in the attainment of a common social-political goal. The image of the transcendent raznochinets hero who acts alone and who cannot help but feel contempt for the people whose lives he wishes to ameliorate and elevate was something genuinely new on the Russian social-cultural scene. Whatever the satisfaction afforded by Pisarev’s praise, Turgenev could hardly have recognized his own complex conception in this celebration of a Bazarov beyond good and evil, a type that had become glorified almost to the dimensions of a Nietzschean superman. And there can be little doubt that it set Dostoevsky’s imagination working along the lines eventually leading to Raskolnikov and his article “On Crime,” which also separates the world into “ordinary” and “extraordinary” people and claims for the second category the right to “step over” the moral law.

  Dostoevsky read Fathers and Children on its magazine publication, at the beginning of March, and conveyed his admiration to Turgenev without delay. He received a reply before the month was out expressing Turgenev’s gratitude and satisfaction: “You have so fully and sensitively grasped what I wished to express in Bazarov. . . . It is as if you had slipped into my soul and intuited even what I did not think necessary to utter. I hope to God . . . everyone sees even a part of what you have seen!”15 A month later, he writes to Dostoevsky again: “no one, it seems, suspected that I tried to present him [Bazarov] as a tragic figure—and everyone says: why is he so bad?—or—why is he so good?”16

  Dostoevsky’s original letter has been lost, but a hint of what Dostoevsky had written Turgenev is given in a few sentences that he set down a year later in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, when he refers to Turgenev’s “restless and tormented Bazarov (the mark of a great heart) in spite of all his Nihilism” (5: 59). Bazarov here is grasped precisely as the kind of tragic figure that Turgenev had wished to portray, a hero whose tragedy lies in the conflict between his Western ideas (his ideology) and “the great heart,” whose impulses and longings he could not suppress or deny.

  It may be assumed that Dostoevsky discussed Turgenev’s novel with Strakhov when assigning him to review it for Time, and Strakhov’s analysis, one of the finest contemporary reactions to the book, undoubtedly conveys a good deal of Dostoevsky’s own ideas. Appearing in the April issue, Strakhov’s article takes into account the responses of both Antonovich and Pisarev, but, in his view, both the enthusiasm of Pisarev and the hostility of Antonovich are equally mistaken for the very reason given by Turgenev himself: each poses the problem of the book in terms of whether the author was really a partisan of the fathers or the children, the past or the future. Its real meaning lies much deeper and is concerned with a far different problem.

  “Never,” Strakhov writes, “has the disaccord between life and thought b
een felt as intensely as at the present time.”17 It is this disaccord that Turgenev dramatizes, and it is here, rather than in the conflict of generations, that the book’s ultimate moral lesson can be located. Bazarov, as Pisarev had rightly said, is manifestly superior as an individual to all the other people in the book, fathers included. But it turns out that he is not superior to the forces of life that they embody, no matter in how paltry a form; he is not superior to the forces that he vainly tries to suppress in himself because they do not jibe with the theory about life that he accepts. Bazarov disapproves of responding to the blandishments of nature, and Turgenev depicts nature in all its beauty; Bazarov does not value friendship or romantic love, and Turgenev shows how real both are in his heart; Bazarov rejects family sentiment, and Turgenev portrays the unselfish, anguished love of his doting parents; Bazarov scorns the appeal of art, and Turgenev delineates him with all the resources of a great poetic talent. “Bazarov is a Titan revolting against his mother earth,”18 Strakhov writes; but no Titan is powerful enough to triumph over the forces that, because they are immutably rooted in man’s emotional nature, provide the eternal foundation of human life.

  Shortly after Strakhov’s article appeared, Turgenev arrived in Petersburg from Paris and hastened to pay a visit to the editorial offices of Time. “He found us assembled,” Strakhov recalls, “and invited Mikhail Mikhailovich, Feodor Mikhailovich, and myself to dine with him in the Hotel Clea. The storm that had blown up against him obviously upset him.”19 Lionized by the reactionaries, vilified by the majority of the radicals, praised by Pisarev for having glorified Nihilism—it was only among the editors of Time, and nowhere else in Russia, that he had found any informed sympathy with and comprehension of the greatest novel of his literary career.