Quarrel & Quandary

by Cynthia Ozick

  Freed from engineering (and from a despotic father), Dostoyevsky went flying into the heart of St. Petersburg’s literary life. It was the hugely influential Belinsky who catapulted him there. Dostoyevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk—inspired by the social realism of Balzac, Victor Hugo, and George Sand, and published in 1846—was just the sort of fiction Belinsky was eager to promote. “Think of it,” he cried, “it’s the first attempt at a social novel we’ve had.” Belinsky was a volatile man of movements—movements he usually set off himself. He was also quickly excitable: he had leaped from art-for-art’s-sake to a kind of messianic socialism (with Jesus as chief socialist) to blatant atheism. In literature he espoused an ardent naturalism, and saw Dostoyevsky as its avatar. He instantly proclaimed the new writer to be a genius, made him famous overnight, and admitted him, at twenty-four, into St. Petersburg’s most coveted intellectual circle, Belinsky’s own “pléiade.” Turgenev was already a member. The talk was socialist and fervent, touching on truth and justice, science and atheism, and, most heatedly, on the freeing of the serfs. Here Christianity was not much more than a historical metaphor, a view Dostoyevsky only briefly entered into; but he was fiery on the issue of human chattel.

  Success went to his head. “Everywhere an unbelievable esteem, a passionate curiosity about me,” he bragged to his brother. “Everyone considers me some sort of prodigy.… I am now almost drunk with my own glory.” The pléiade responded to this posturing at first with annoyance and then with rough ribbing. Belinsky kept out of it, but Turgenev took off after the young prodigy with a scathing parody. Dostoyevsky walked out, humiliated and enraged, and never returned. “They are all scoundrels and eaten up with envy,” he fumed. He soon gravitated to another socialist discussion group, which met on Friday nights at the home of Mikhail Petrashevsky, a twenty-six-year-old aristocrat. Petrashevsky had accumulated a massive library of political works forbidden by the censors, and was even less tolerant of Christianity than the pléiade: for him Jesus was “the well-known demagogue.” To improve the miserable living conditions of the peasants on his land, Petrashevsky had a commodious communal dormitory built for them, with every amenity provided. They all moved in, and the next day burned down the master’s paternalistic utopia. Undaunted, Petrashevsky continued to propagandize for his ideas: the end of serfdom and censorship, and the reform of the courts. His commitment was to gradualism, but certain more impatient members of the Petrashevsky circle quietly formed a secret society dedicated to an immediate and deeply perilous activism.

  It was with these that Dostoyevsky aligned himself; he joined a scheme to print and disseminate the explosive manifesto in the form of the letter to Gogol, which Belinsky had composed a year or so earlier, protesting the enslavement of the peasants. Russia, Belinsky wrote, “presents the dire spectacle of a country where men traffic in men, without ever having the excuse so insidiously exploited by the American plantation owners who claim that the Negro is not a man.” Dostoyevsky gave an impressive reading of this document at one of Petrashevsky’s Friday nights. His audience erupted into an uproar; there were yells of “That’s it! That’s it!” A government spy, unrecognized, took notes, and at four in the morning Dostoyevsky’s bedroom was invaded by the Czar’s secret police. He was arrested as a revolutionary conspirator; he was twenty-seven years old.

  Nicholas I took a malicious interest in the punishment for this crime against the state—the Czar was the state—and personally ordered the mock execution, the last-minute reprieve, the transport to Siberia. Dostoyevsky’s sentence was originally eight years; he served four at forced labor in a prison camp at Omsk and the rest in an army regiment. In Siberia, after his release from the camp, he married for the first time—a tumultuous widow with worsening tuberculosis. His own affliction worsened; seizure followed on seizure. For the remainder of his life he would not be free of the anguish of fits. He feared he would die while in their grip.

  The moment of cataclysmic terror before the firing squad never left him. He was not so much altered as strangely—almost mystically—restored: restored to what he had felt as a child, kneeling with his mother at the reliquary of St. Sergey. He spoke circumspectly of “the regeneration of my convictions.” The only constant was his hatred of the institution of serfdom—but to hate serfdom was not to love peasants, and when he began to live among peasant convicts (political prisoners were not separated from the others), he found them degraded and savage, with a malignant hostility toward the gentry thrown into their midst. The agonies of hard labor, the filth, the chains, the enmity, the illicit drunkenness, his own nervous disorders—all these assailed him, and he suffered in captivity from a despondency nearly beyond endurance.

  And then—in a metamorphosis akin to the Ancient Mariner’s sudden love for the repulsive creatures of the sea—he was struck by what can only be called a conversion experience. In the twisted and branded faces of the peasant convicts—men much like those who may have murdered his father—he saw a divine illumination; he saw the true Russia; he saw beauty; he saw the kind-hearted serf who had consoled him when the imaginary wolf pursued. Their instinctive piety was his. Their soil-rootedness became a precept. He struggled to distinguish between one criminal motive and another: from the viewpoint of a serf, was a crime against a hardened master really a crime? Under the tatters of barbarism, he perceived the image of God.

  The collective routine of the stockade drove him further and further from the socialist dream of communal living. “To be alone is a normal need,” he railed. “Otherwise, in this enforced communism one turns into a hater of mankind.” And at the same time he began to discover in the despised and brutalized lives of the peasant convicts a shadow of the redemptive suffering that is the Christian paradigm. More and more he inclined toward the traditional Orthodoxy of his upbringing. He fought doubt with passionate unreason: “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, then I should prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth.” This set him against his old associates, both radicals and liberals. It set him against Petrashevsky and Belinsky, whose highest aspiration had been a constitutional republic in league with a visionary ethical socialism. It set him against illustrious literary moderates and Westernizers like Turgenev and Alexander Herzen. Emerging from his Siberian ordeal, he thundered against “the scurvy Russian liberalism propagated by good-for-nothings.” Years later, when Belinsky was dead, Dostoyevsky was still sneering at “shitheads like the dung-beetle Belinsky,” whom he would not forgive because “that man reviled Christ to me in the foulest language.”

  The culmination of these renunciations was a white-hot abomination of radicalism in all its forms—from the Western-influenced gentry-theorists of the eighteen-forties to the renegade raskolniki (dissenters) who burst into nihilism in the sixties, when student revolutionaries radicalized the universities. With his brother Mikhail, Dostoyevsky founded Vremya (Time), a literary-political periodical intended to combat the socialist radicals. Their immediate target was The Contemporary, an opposing polemical journal; it was in the arena of the monthlies that the ideological fires, under literary cover to distract the censors, smoldered. Though Vremya was a success, a misunderstanding led the censorship to close it down. Soon afterward, Dostoyevsky’s wife died of consumption; then Mikhail collapsed and died. The grieving Dostoyevsky attempted to revive the magazine under another name, but in the absence of his brother’s business management he fell into serious debt, went bankrupt, and in 1867 fled to the hated West to escape his creditors.

  With him went Anna, the worshipful young stenographer to whom he had begun to dictate his work, and whom he shortly married. Four enforced years abroad took on the half-mad, hallucinatory frenzy of scenes in his own novels: he gambled and lost, gambled and wrote, pawned his wife’s rings and gambled and lost and wrote. His work was appearing regularly in the reactionary Russian Messenger. Dostoyevsky had now altogether gone over to the other side. “All those trashy little liberals and progressives,” he mocked, “find th
eir greatest pleasure and satisfaction in criticizing Russia … everything of the slightest originality in Russia [is] hateful to them.” It was on this issue that he broke with Turgenev, to whom words like “folk” and “glory” smelled of blood. Turgenev, for his part, thought Dostoyevsky insane. And yet it was Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, with its ambiguous portrait of a scoffing nihilist, that was Raskolnikov’s sensational precursor.

  Turgenev’s novel was dedicated to Belinsky. Dostoyevsky broke with Belinsky, he broke with Turgenev, he broke with Petrashevsky, he broke with Herzen—not only because of their liberalism, but because he believed that they did not love Russia enough. To love Russia was to love the Czar and the debased peasant (who, debased by the Czar, also loved the Czar); it was to see human suffering as holy and the peasant as holy; it was to exalt the obshchina, the Russian village commune, while condemning the French philosophic cooperative; it was to love the Russian Church largely through the vilification of all other churches; it was to press for the love of God with a hateful ferocity.

  Joseph Frank seems certain that Dostoyevsky’s conversion “should not be seen as that of a strayed ex-believer returning to Christ,” since he had “always remained in some sense a Christian.” But the suggestion of a continuum of sensibility may be even stronger than that. After a plunge into the period’s dominant cultural milieu, the son of an authoritarian father—authoritarian personally, religiously, nationally—returns to the father. It is common enough that an intellectual progression will lead to a recovery of the voices around the cradle.

  In January of 1881, Dostoyevsky, now an honored literary eminence more celebrated than Turgenev, died of a hemorrhage of the throat. Two months later, Czar Alexander II—Russia’s earnest liberalizer and liberator—was assassinated. From the last half of the nineteenth century until the Bolshevik defeat of the liberal Kerensky government in the second decade of the twentieth, revolution continued to overcome reform. In this guise—injury for the sake of an ideal—Raskolnikov lives on. For seventy years he was victorious in Russia. And even now, after the death of the Soviet Union, auguring no one knows what, his retributive figure roves the earth. If he is currently mute in Russia, he remains restive in Northern Ireland, and loud in the Middle East; he has migrated to America. He survives in the violence of humanitarian visionaries who would seize their utopias via ax, Molotov cocktail, or innocent-looking packages sent through the mail.

  4.

  Raskolnikov as monster of ruination, reason’s avenging angel: here speaks the ideologue Dostoyevsky, scourge of the radicals. But this single clangorous note will not hold. Dostoyevsky the novelist tends toward orchestration and multiplicity. Might there be other reasons for the murder of the old woman? Raskolnikov has already been supplied with messianic utilitarianism, a Western import, carried to its logical and lethal end. On second thought (Dostoyevsky’s second thought), the killing may have a different and simpler source—family solidarity. A university dropout, unable to meet his tuition payments, Raskolnikov, alienated and desperate, has been guiltily taking money from his adoring mother and sister in the provinces. At home there is crisis: Dunya, his sister, has been expelled from her position as governess in the Svidrigailov household, where the debauched husband and father had been making lecherous advances. To elude disgrace and to ease her family’s poverty—but chiefly to secure a backer for her brother’s career—Dunya becomes engaged to a rich and contemptible St. Petersburg bureaucrat. In this version of Raskolnikov’s intent, it is to save his sister from a self-sacrificial marriage that he robs the old woman and pounds her to death.

  Dostoyevsky will hurry the stealing-for-sustenance thesis out of sight quickly enough. As a motive, it is too narrow for his larger purpose, and by the close of the novel it seems almost forgotten, and surely marginal—not only because Raskolnikov hides the stolen money and valuables and never touches them again, but because such an obvious material reason is less shattering than what Dostoyevsky will soon disclose. He will goad Raskolnikov to a tempestuousness even past nihilism. Past nihilism lies pure violence—violence for is own sake, without the vindication of a superior future. The business of revolution is only to demolish, the anarchist theorist and agitator Mikhail Bakunin once declared. But in Raskolnikov’s newest stand, not even this extremist position is enough:

  Then I realized … that power is given only to the one who dares to reach down and take it. Here there is one thing, one thing only: one has only to dare!… I wanted to dare, and I killed … that’s the whole reason!… I wanted to kill without casuistry … to kill for myself, for myself alone! I didn’t want to lie about it even to myself! It was not to help my mother that I killed—nonsense! I did not kill so that, having obtained means and power, I could become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense!… And it was not money above all that I wanted when I killed … I wanted to find out then, and find out quickly, whether I was a louse like all the rest, or a man?… Would I dare to reach down and take, or not?

  A rapid shuttling of motives, one overtaking the other: family reasons, societal reasons, altruism, utilitarianism, socialism, nihilism, Napoleonic raw domination. Generations of readers have been mystified by this plethora of incitements and explanations. Why so many? One critic, the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin, analyzing Dostoyevsky’s frequent ellipses and the back-and-forth interior dialogue of characters disputing with themselves—each encompassing multiple points of view—concludes that Dostoyevsky was the inventor of a new “multi-voice” genre, which Bakhtin calls the “polyphonic novel.” Some simply assume that Dostoyevsky changed his mind as he went along, and since he was unable to revise what was already in print—the novel appeared in installments written against deadlines—he was compelled to stitch up the loose ends afterward as best he could. (This sounds plausible enough; if true, it would leave most serious Dostoyevsky scholars of the last century with egg on their faces.)

  A British academic, A. D. Nuttall, offers a psychiatric solution: Raskolnikov is in a state of self-hypnotic schizophrenia. Walter Kaufmann invokes existentialism, drawing Dostoyevsky into Nietzsche’s and Kierkegaard’s web. Freud speculates that Dostoyevsky expresses “sympathy by identification” with criminals as a result of an Oedipal revolt against his father. Harold Bloom, sailing over Raskolnikov’s inconsistencies, sees in him an apocalyptic figure, “a powerful representative of the will demonized by its own strength.” “The best of all murder stories,” says Bloom, “Crime and Punishment seems to me beyond praise and beyond affection.” For Vladimir Nabokov, on the other hand, the novel is beyond contempt; he knew even in his teens that it was “long-winded, terribly sentimental, and badly written.” Dostoyevsky is “mediocre,” and his “gallery of characters consists almost exclusively of neurotics and lunatics.” As for Dostoyevsky’s religion, it is a “special lurid brand of the Christian faith.” “I am very eager to debunk Dostoyevsky,” Nabokov assures us.

  Is this a case of the blind men and the elephant? Or the novel as Rorschach test? There is something indeterminate in all these tumbling alternatives—in Raskolnikov’s changing theories, in the critics’ clashing responses. Still, all of them taken together make plain what it is that Dostoyevsky’s novel turns out not to be. It is not, after all, a singlemindedly polemical tract fulminating against every nineteenth-century radical movement in sight—though parts may pass for that. It is not a detective thriller, despite its introduction of Porfiry, a crafty, nimble-tongued, penetratingly intuitive police investigator. It is not a social protest novel, even if it retains clear vestiges of an abandoned earlier work on alcoholism and poverty in the forlorn Marmeladovs, whom Raskolnikov befriends: drunken husband, unbalanced tubercular wife, daughter driven to prostitution.

  And it is not even much of what it has often been praised for being: a “psychological” novel—notwithstanding a startling stab, now and then, into the marrow of a mind. George Eliot is what we mean, in literature, by psychological; among the moderns, Proust, Joyce, James. Dostoyevsky is not psych
ological in the sense of understanding and portraying familiar human nature. Crime and Punishment is in exile from human nature—like the deeply eccentric Notes from Underground, which precedes it by a year. The underground man, Raskolnikov’s indispensable foreshadower, his very embryo, revels in the corrupt will to seek out extreme and horrible acts, which gladden him with their “shameful accursed sweetness.” But Raskolnikov will in time feel suffocated by the mental anguish that dogs his crime. Suspicions close in on him; a room in a police station seems no bigger than a cupboard. And soon suffering criminality will put on the radiant robes of transcendence. Led by the saintly Sonya Marmeladova, who has turned harlot to support her destitute family, Raskolnikov looks at last to God. The nihilist, the insolent Napoleon, is all at once redeemed—implausibly, abruptly—by a single recitation from the Gospels, and goes off, docile and remorseful, to serve out his sentence in Siberia.