Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  His seizures had apparently affected even his long-term memory. P. V. Bykov, a journalist and writer who had met Dostoevsky in the 1860s, had recently requested a biography and bibliography for a volume of essays on Russian writers that he planned to publish. But Dostoevsky confesses, “I’ll tell you right out that at present I am incapable of [sending you an exact biography]. As a consequence of my epilepsy . . . I have somewhat lost my memory, and—would you believe—have forgotten (literally forgotten, without the slightest exaggeration) plots of my novels and characters portrayed, even in Crime and Punishment. Nonetheless, I do remember the general outlines of my life.”26 He promised Bykov that he would perhaps “put together my biography for you” in Ems, where he planned to spend the summer.

  The torment of not receiving any reply to his missives was more than he could endure, and he sent off two telegrams to Maly Prikol inquiring about Anna’s well-being. When a letter finally arrived on July 16, he wrote the next day to justify his harassed behavior. “I haven’t been able to sleep, I worry, sort through the chances [of an accident] pace around the room, have visions of the children, worry about you, my heart pounds (I’ve had palpitations of the heart start up these last three days). . . . It finally begins to dawn, and I sob, pace around the room and cry, with a sort of shaking (I don’t understand it myself, it’s never happened before) and I just try not to let the old woman [Prokhorovna] hear it.”27 This passage can stand for many others in which he describes losing control of his nerves as his fertile imagination conjures up every disaster that might befall his family, especially the children.

  Despite his desire to return to the sheltering warmth of the family circle, Dostoevsky felt it imperative to make a journey to Darovoe, the country property of his parents, unvisited since childhood, and now occupied by the family of his sister Varvara Karepina, who had inherited the property. He referred to this trip in his July–August 1877 Diary, where he reports on a conversation with “one of my old Moscow acquaintances” (probably Ivan Aksakov). “This little, unremarkable spot,” he told his friend, “had left a deep and strong impression on me for my whole life.” Dostoevsky emphasizes the importance for children to store up “sacred memories” (a point he will illustrate through Alyosha Karamazov), and writes that “a person cannot even live without something sacred and precious from childhood to carry into life” (25: 172). Dostoevsky’s visit had unquestionably brought back recollections of his own father. A passage in Dostoevsky’s text can be read as a confession of how he may have judged (and pardoned) his own progenitor.

  “Today’s fathers,” he writes, do not possess any “great idea” that they pass on to their children, and “in their hearts” they have no great faith in such an idea. Yet, “it is only a great faith of this kind that is capable of giving birth to something beautiful in the memories of children, and indeed it can, even despite that same moral filth that surrounds their cradles. . . . [E]ven . . . the most fallen of fathers, who . . . has been able to transplant the seed of this great idea and great feeling into the impressionable and eager souls of his pitiable children, . . . has later been wholeheartedly forgiven by them because of this good deed alone, despite other things” (25: 180–181). Dostoevsky often uses the expression “great idea” to mean the idea of the Christian morality of love and the Christian promise of eternity. He could well have felt, after the visit to Darovoe, that his own far from blameless father had nevertheless succeeded in planting these seeds in the hearts of his children.

  During the fall and winter months of 1877 Dostoevsky toiled away at the Diary, even though he had been “sick in bed for two weeks with a fever.”28 In October 1877, however, he informed readers of the Diary that he intended to terminate its publication at the end of the year. An old confidant, Dr. Stepan Yanovsky, wrote from Vevey in Switzerland, expressing gratitude on behalf of the Russian circle there for the patriotic support given their homeland in the Diary. Like many others, Yanovsky expressed regret at the cessation of the Diary, and Dostoevsky explains that, aside from the worsening of his epilepsy, he had decided to suspend publication because “there is a novel in my head and my heart, and it’s beginning to be written.” Moreover, in the future “I want to try a new publication into which the Diary will enter as a part.”29 Early in 1878 he had sketched a plan for such a new monthly, no longer written exclusively by himself, that included more literary material and critical essays. “You wouldn’t believe to what an extent I have enjoyed the sympathy of Russians during these two years of publication,” he exultantly informs the doctor. Yanovsky had spoken disparagingly of Kraevsky’s newspaper, Voice, which had become highly critical of the Russo-Turkish War, and Dostoevsky snaps, “These gentlemen will in fact disappear. . . . Those who do not understand the people will now undoubtedly have to join the stockbrokers and the Yids, and that’s the end of the representatives of our ‘progressive’ thought,”30 The “Yids” are thus automatically associated with all those non-Jewish Russians who remain skeptical about the war, and whose motives for doing so, in his extremely jaundiced eyes, can only be grossly and sordidly material.

  Nekrasov died in December 1877, and the Dostoevskys attended the church services at the Novodeichy convent. Hordes of students and admirers came to pay their last respects to the poet who had given poignant expression to the social-humanitarian themes of the 1840s, and had later written so movingly of the limitless sorrows of Russian peasant life in his great cycle of poems, Who Is Happy In Russia? Several people spoke at the graveside, among them Dostoevsky, who improvised some remarks in response to a request, as Anna writes, from “the surrounding crowd of young people.”31 Nekrasov, Dostoevsky said, “was the last of that series of poets who came to us with their ‘new word,’ ” and that “among such poets he should stand directly after Pushkin and Lermontov.” At this, a dissenting “voice from the crowd cried out that Nekrasov was greater than Pushkin and Lermontov and that the latter were only ‘Byronists.’ ” Several voices coming from a small group led by Plekhanov then took up the refrain and shouted, “Yes, greater!”32

  This small episode may stand as a symbolic indication of the growing aggressiveness of the hitherto peaceful Populists. During 1877 the government brought three groups of them to trial: those who had demonstrated before the Cathedral of Kazan and two groups arrested for having “gone to the people” three years earlier. The second trial, known as that of “the fifty,” produced a deep and lasting impression on the radical intelligentsia. The accused testified with great dignity about the intolerable conditions they had been forced to endure, and brought the more humane and educated members of the public face to face with the grim realities of a repressive regime. This public was shocked by the unconscionable length of time these young people had been imprisoned before being brought to trial, and by the severe sentences meted out for their perfectly peaceable and often charitable “crimes.”

  There are numerous contemporary accounts of the religiously charged atmosphere that surrounded the trial of “the fifty,” during which, according to the Populist radical writer Stepniak-Kravchinsky, the word “saints” was often heard uttered about the defendants by those in the courtroom.33 D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky writes:

  Not all, perhaps, but very many of those who went to the people were inspired . . . by the evangelical ideal of loving one’s neighbor, and of sacrificing one’s worldly goods and personal happiness. When the so-called “trial of the fifty” disclosed the activity of young women self-sacrificingly carrying the “good news” of Socialism, motifs from the Gospels, parallels with the Sermon on the Mount, involuntarily came to mind. These young women could look forward in life to happiness and satisfaction, among them were some with considerable wealth. . . . But they preferred to this the life of a saint, they exchanged their happiness for a heroic deed, and sacrificed themselves for a high ideal, which seemed to them only a new expression of this very same evangelical ideal.34

  At the trial, in a speech that quickly became famous, one of the accus
ed, Sophia Bardini, declared, “As regards religion [whose precepts she had been accused of violating], I may say only that I have always remained faithful to its existing principles, in that pure form in which it was preached by the founder of Christianity.”35 One of the last poems that Nekrasov wrote on his deathbed was inspired by this trial, and there is good reason to believe that it echoed in Dostoevsky’s work as well. Just a year later, he began to draft The Brothers Karamazov; and when he came to describe his young hero, Alyosha, whose life would constitute the second (never written) volume, he wrote, “if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and Socialist (for Socialism is . . . the question of the Tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth” (14: 25). Alyosha’s innate goodness and craving for justice led him to become a novice in a monastery once he had decided in favor of God and immortality. Both he and the Socialists look forward to the reign of goodness and charitable love; they differ only on whether it should be attained under the guidance of a secular or a supernatural Christ.

  It was not only through his next novel, however, that Dostoevsky hoped to influence the young radicals to follow the way of Alyosha. For over two years he had attempted to do so in the Diary of a Writer. Let us now turn back for a closer look at this massive publication, which dominated Russian public opinion as no such journal had ever done before.

  1 Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 213.

  2 Cited in DVS, 2: 364–365.

  3 Ibid., 286.

  4 Ibid., 282–283.

  5 Ibid., 285.

  6 PSS, 29/Bk. 2: 66–67; November 10, 1875.

  7 Ibid., 75–76; March 10, 1876.

  8 Ibid., 78; April 9, 1876.

  9 DVS, 2: 242–243.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Cited in the commentary to the letter of Maslannikov, the lawyer who offered his help, in Dostoevsky i ego vremya (Leningrad, 1971), 277.

  12 PSS, 29/Bk. 2: 79; April 9, 1876.

  13 Ibid.

  14 DVS, 337.

  15 PSS, 29/Bk. 2: 95–98; July 13/25, 1876.

  16 Reminiscences, 264.

  17 PSS, 29/Bk. 2: 105; July 18/30, 1876.

  18 Ibid., 104; July 21/August 2, 1876.

  19 Ibid., 117; July 30/August 11, 1876.

  20 Ibid., 99–100; July 15/27, 1876.

  21 Ibid., 101–103; July 16/28, 1876.

  22 Ibid., 271; November 13, 1876.

  23 Ibid., 132–133; November 16, 1876.

  24 Reminiscences, 283.

  25 PSS, 29/Bk. 2: 163; July 7, 1877.

  26 Ibid., 80; April 15, 1876.

  27 Ibid., 170–173; July 17, 1877.

  28 Ibid., 176–177; December 7, 1877.

  29 Ibid., 178–179; December 17, 1877.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Reminiscences, 288.

  32 PSS, 26: 112–113; 416.

  33 See Franco Venturi, The Roots of Revolution (New York, 1966), 586.

  34 D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, “Istoria Russkoi intelligentsia,” Sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1910–1911), 8: 193–194.

  35 Quoted in V. Bogucharsky, Aktivnoe narodnichestvo semidesyatikh godov (Moscow, 1912), 298.

  CHAPTER 51

  The Diary of a Writer, 1876–1877

  The ideas promulgated in the Diary of a Writer were already familiar from Dostoevsky’s earlier journalism, as well as from the ideological flights of his novels. But they are given new life and color by the constant parade of fresh examples drawn from his omnivorous reading of the current press, from his wide knowledge of history and literature both Russian and European, and, very frequently, from the events of his own life. Such autobiographical revelations were certainly one of the main attractions of the Diary; readers felt they were truly being admitted into the intimacy of one of their great men. This constant interplay between the personal and the public—the incessant shift of level between the social problems of the day, the “accursed questions” that have always plagued human life, and the glimpses into the recesses of Dostoevsky’s own private life and sensibility—proved an irresistible combination that gave the Diary its unique literary cachet.

  In addition, the Diary served as a stimulus not only for short stories and sketches but also, as he had anticipated, for the major novel he was planning to write. Time and again motifs appear that will soon be utilized in The Brothers Karamazov. Even if not literally a notebook, the Diary lives up to this name in the exact sense of the word. It is genuinely the working tool of a writer in the early stages of creation—a writer who searches for (and finds) the inspiration for his work as, pen in hand, he surveys the passing scene and attempts to cope with its deeper import.

  I. Journalism

  In the 1860s, Dostoevsky’s journals had advanced a doctrine of pochvennichestvo, advocating the return of the intelligentsia to their own native soil, to their own culture and its moral-religious roots and values. This conception of the ideal relation between the intelligentsia and the people forms the background for the treatment of this question in the Diary. The peasants were liberated with land, Dostoevsky writes in the June 1876 issue, “because we saw ourselves as Russians, with the Tsar at our head, exactly as the landowner Pushkin dreamed forty years ago, when . . . he cursed his European upbringing and turned to the principles of the people” (22: 120).1 “Our demos is content,” he announces with astonishing complacency, “and the further we go, the more satisfied it will become, for everything is moving toward that end via the common mood, or, to put it better, the general consensus” (22: 122). Dostoevsky was firmly persuaded that the governing class would continue to act in the name of the people’s own supposedly Christian ideals. When many readers vociferously objected that the Russian demos was far from being satisfied, he took their criticisms only as additional proof of the good will of the educated class and further corroboration of his point of view (“even now no one here will stand up for the idea that we must bestialize one group of people for the welfare of another group that represents civilization, such as is the case all over Europe”) (22: 31).

  In a February 1876 entry dealing with Konstantin Aksakov, Dostoevsky restates the key ideas of pochvennichestvo. Putting the question bluntly, he asks: “Who is better, we [the intelligentsia] or the people?” And he answers: “we must bow down before the people’s truth and acknowledge it as the truth, even in the awful event that some of it comes from the Lives of the Saints” (22: 44). “In what way,” he asks, “did we, the cultured people, become morally and essentially superior to the people when we returned from Europe?” (22: 110). The answer that he gives is unequivocal: in no way at all, and in fact, quite the contrary.

  The same point is made when he discusses the example of Foma Danilov in the January 1877 issue. This Russian soldier, captured in Turkestan, had refused under torture to convert to Islam (Smerdyakov, in The Brothers Karamazov, thinks he was a fool). A pension had recently been awarded his impoverished family by the tsar, and for Dostoevsky he becomes “what amounts to the portrait, the complete picture of the Russian people.” It is time for the intelligentsia to ask themselves whether there is “something moral, something sublime to pass on to them [the people], to explain to them, and thus to bring light to their dark souls?” Not at all. “The people have Foma Danilovs by the thousands, while we have no faith at all in Russian strength” (25: 12–17).

  The most important political event affecting the Diary was the outbreak of a revolt against Turkish rule in the Slavic province of Herzegovina during the summer of 1875. In mid-June 1876, the independent Slav principalities of Serbia and Montenegro also declared war against Turkey. In April 1877, Russia joined the conflict in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, whose immediate cause was the Turkish refusal to agree to Russian demands to accord more rights to Balkan Christians living under Turkish rule. Dostoevsky was a member of the Slavic Benevolent Society, which had been in the forefr
ont of Pan-Slavic agitation, and was a fervent supporter of both the rebellion and the war. More and more of the articles in the Diary, especially in 1877, proclaimed the momentous moral-spiritual consequences, for Russia and for world history, of what seemed to others merely another struggle for territory and power. Their inflammatory appeal, justifying the war on the highest moral-religious principles, helped to stir up patriotic fervor and evoked widespread response.

  If Dostoevsky could brilliantly sweep aside denigrations of the people, it was still difficult for him to produce evidence to support his own contrary view of their exalted moral essence. The declaration of war by Serbia and Montenegro against Turkey was a godsend. The Russian volunteer movement, organized to support the Slavs, led to a mass outpouring not only of material aid but also of men volunteering to join the Serbian Army and women to serve as nurses. The people had embarked on “a new crusade” because they had heard that “their Slav brethren were being tortured and oppressed.” No such solidarity had been expected of this “supposedly homogeneous and torpid mass.” It certified for Dostoevsky that the Russian people still admired someone “who continually works for God’s cause, who loves the truth, and who, when it is necessary, rises up to serve that truth, leaving his home and his family and sacrificing his life.” This is why, as he informs his readers, “we can joyously allow ourselves to hope anew, our horizon has cleared, and our new sun rises with dazzling brilliance” (23: 161–162).

  The final stage of Dostoevsky’s apotheosis of the Russian people came after the Russian declaration of war against Turkey. Now he argues that the Russian people possess as well the capacity to create a new Christian world order. Indeed, this was the basis on which Dostoevsky believed that the people and the educated class could be brought together. The Europeanized Russian intellectuals and the people are united, with no awareness of their agreement, in the faith that Russia “will pronounce the greatest word that the world has heard,” and that this word will be the mandate for the unity of all humanity in a spirit transcending “personal egoism” and “the struggle for existence” that “now unites people and nations artificially and unnaturally” (25: 19–20). Because Dostoevsky made no distinction between the Russian state and the Russian people, such lofty pronouncements also served to provide a morally attractive façade for Russian imperialism in the Balkans and Central Asia.