Alexander II

by Edvard Radzinsky

  That is exactly why satire was so successful among the intelligentsia. Constant criticism is what the new social class demanded and welcomed. Their idol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, wrote an immortal satire, a sacred book for Russian liberals, The Story of the Town of Glupovo. The miserable inhabitants of the town are whipped and robbed by the rulers, the city officials, who compete in viciousness, greed, and idiocy. The townspeople compete in docility. One of the city officials turns out to have an artificial head. It does not keep him from ruling the docile residents of Glupovo, or keep the people from fearing and obeying him. Young readers easily recognized Russian tsars in the town officials and the history of Russian fear and servility in the history of the townspeople. The moral of the book, the thread through the entire narrative, is to put an end to the docility and our stupid history.

  Alexander’s reign produced many literary gems. Leo Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoevsky wrote their greatest novels in that period. They were the first Russian writers to win world fame. Of all contemporary writers, only they had points in common. Both studied the cosmos of the human soul, the disharmony of the world, the relationship of man and God. And yet these geniuses, who were jealously interested in each other, never met. They both knew every other well-known writer. Once they were both present at a public lecture by the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, whom they both esteemed. Yet even though they were in the same hall, they did not meet. It was as if they were avoiding each other.

  Why? The scope of their personalities did not permit it. They would have found it too crowded. They would have immediately plunged into an ideological battle, which in Russia always ends with hatred. That is why both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky feuded with Turgenev, a writer beneath them, whom they both knew well. As a Russian grandee in the eighteenth century once said, “We Russians don’t need bread, instead we eat each other up and feel satisfied.”

  Death changed everything. After Dostoevsky’s death, Tolstoy immediately wrote, “I never saw the man.. But suddenly, when he died, I understood that he was the closest, most necessary, dearest man to me.” The Brothers Karamazov was Tolstoy’s last reading before his own death in 1910.

  The end brought our two greatest writers together. But this was only the beginning. Count Leo Tolstoy retired to his estate in Yasnaya Polyana, where in the 1860s he wrote War and Peace, a novel with resounding success.

  When Alexander II ascended the throne, Dostoevsky had served his sentence of hard labor and was serving as an ordinary soldier in Semipalatinsk, a distant Siberian town. The new regime restored his rights and his noble rank. Like Tolstoy, he retired from the army with the rank of officer and went back to literature. Dostoevsky began using the terrible capital he accrued at hard labor, which no other Russian writer had at that time. It was the “black, ill-starred life,” the world of social outcasts and prison camps. Dostoevsky was the first to reveal it to Russian readers in Notes from the House of the Dead.

  The book was not only about the hell of hard-labor prison camps, but also about freeing oneself from a personal hell. In the camp where “suffering was inexpressible, endless, and every minute weighed you down like a stone on your soul,” Dostoevsky went through a spiritual cataclysm—a “trial of myself” and a “severe examination of my former life.” He became an enemy of the ideas for which he had paid with years of suffering, the best years of his life. He came to think that the idea of revolution was innately sinful—it was wrong to think that happiness could be won violently, through blood. He returned from hard labor a new man.

  Dostoevsky was tormented in his ideological seekings and in his personal life. He was passionately in love with Maria Isaeyva, wife of the warden. He married her when she became a widow and their happy union ended only when Masha, as he called her, died of tuberculosis. But even as she lay dying, Dostoevsky embarked on a new passion, love for the “tormenting woman,” Apolinaria Suslova. He felt “tormenting guilt” before the dying Masha. The day after his wife’s death (April 16, 1864), he wrote in his notebook, “Masha is laid out. Will I see Masha again?” He pondered life beyond the grave and expressed his fear of meeting her there, his fear of his sin.

  The image of Apolinaria Suslova pursued him to his deathbed, appearing in novel after novel: Polina (The Gambler), Nastasya Filippovna (The Idiot), and Grushenka (The Brothers Karamazov). His passion for her was combined at that time with another “tormenting passion,” gambling. His mad gambling forced him to work madly. The 1860s saw a fertile flow of his works: “Uncle’s Dream,” “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants,” The Insulted and Injured, among others. The money he earned was instantly consumed by the roulette table. He was continually in debt and his creditors hounded him.

  So Dostoevsky decided to embark on two novels at the same time, Crime and Punishment and The Gambler. On the brink of debtor’s prison and pressed by creditors, he sold the rights to all his works to the publisher Stellovsky, with the obligation to add a new work to the previous ones. The contract was stringent: If he did not turn in The Gambler on time, the publisher could publish all of Dostoevsky’s work for free for nine years.

  Time flew and he had less than a month before his deadline, yet he had not written a line of it. He decided to dictate the novel to a stenographer in three weeks. Thus the young secretary Anya Snitkina entered his life. Working feverishly, Dostoevsky completed The Gambler in three weeks.

  By the end of the dictation, the kind, pure, and naïve Anya had replaced his old love. Now Apolinaria Suslova lived in the novel he had dictated to Anya, and Anya entered his real life.

  The writer, who feared he would be rejected, proposed in a literary way. He told Anya the plot of a new novel. The hero was “a man prematurely aged, sick with an incurable disease, grim and suspicious, albeit with a tender heart but unable to express his feelings…an artist, perhaps talented, but a failure who has never been able to shape his ideas into the forms he dreamed of.” This was Dostoevsky’s pitiless self-portrait.

  “And this unsuccessful artist,” he continued, “has fallen in love with a girl, not a beauty, but very pretty…. The more he saw her, the more he was attracted to her, especially since he was convinced that he could find happiness with her. Is it possible that a young woman, so different in personality and age, could fall in love with my artist? Would this be psychologically inaccurate?”

  Only toward the end of this monologue did Anya Snitkina realize, looking at his suffering face, what he was talking about. The twenty-year-old told the forty-five-year-old writer, “I love you and I will love you all my life.”

  They were married in February 1867. His insight was correct, and he finally “found the happiness I had so desired.” Crime and Punishment, which was published then, was the first of his novels to have “huge success with readers.” The novel’s protagonist, the student Rodion Raskolnikov, was a “theoretical killer” who “dreamed of making humanity happy and saving the poor through murder.” He ends up collapsing and discovering revelation and repentance in prison camp.

  The novel was the new Dostoevsky’s dire warning to society after his return from Siberia and seeing the revolutionary mood among the young. The fashionable radical critics attacked Crime and Punishment, condemning it for slandering the young and playing into the hands of the retrogrades. But they could not keep it from being a popular success.

  While the novel was in press, a murder took place in Moscow. A student named Danilov, who had killed someone during a robbery, explained his crime with a chilling similarity to the fictional (and as yet unpublished) Raskolnikov. Dostoevsky was very proud of his foresight.

  His foresight would become even more dangerous. Very soon, under that sorrowful St. Petersburg sky, the young terrorists would appear. The “theoretical murderers” would be tormented by Raskolnikov’s questions: Can you cross the line? Can you kill a man for the sake of an idea? For the sake of the future happiness of humanity? Like Dostoevsky’s character, they would overcome their doubts and go out to kill.

  C
hapters of both Crime and Punishment and War and Peace were printed in the same issues of the journal Russkii Vestnik (Russian Herald). And even though both works were hugely successful, the most progressive young people were lining up for a different magazine. They wanted the issue of Sovremennik with Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is To Be Done?

  Impossible under Nicholas I, it happened in Alexander II’s reign: a novel written by a prisoner was published. The copies of Sovremennik were quickly confiscated, but too late. The novel took on a life of its own. There wasn’t a thinking young person in Russia who had not read What Is To Be Done?

  The book is a mystery of Russian literature. Without a trace of great talent, it nevertheless influenced people for half a century. The terrorist Alexander Ulyanov considered it his revolutionary bible. When his younger brother, Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) read it, he claimed, “This book plowed me up.” What Is To Be Done? made the future leader of Bolshevik Russia a revolutionary.

  The book is ideological, offering up every radical and progressive idea of the period—happy collective labor, the emancipation of women, free love higher than the bounds of bourgeois marriage—to its young readers. Its biggest attraction, however, was the character of Rakhmetov. He appeared in the chapter “A Special Man.” Reading the chapter, young people habitually filled in the blanks in the narrative of the author, sitting in a cell in the Fortress of Peter and Paul.

  The “special man” Rakhmetov prepares himself to serve the people (read, “foment revolution”), hardens himself for future deprivation (naturally, prison and hard labor), eats raw meat, and sleeps on a bed of nails. To share the labor of the people and to understand them, the aristocrat Rakhmetov periodically works as a laborer, even as a Volga boatman. (Soon, a whole movement of “going to the people” would spring up among the intelligentsia.) He rejects personal happiness, wife, children, anything that could distract him from serving the happiness of people (again, revolution). He spends his money not on his own needs, but to help needy students (rebellious students, naturally).

  Readers took the author’s word as a testament and appeal: “Here is a real man, who is particularly needed by Russia today. Make him your model and whoever can and has the strength, follow his path, for it is the only path for you that can lead us to the desired goal.”

  Revolution and Rakhmetov was the answer to the question in the title. For decades the iron ascetic Rakhmetov captured the imagination of Russian youth. He was a symbol for revolutionaries, a Che Guevara for his time.

  Rakhmetov offers a key to the behavior of future Russian terrorists. Heading off to revolution, young people would enthusiastically submit to Rakhmetov’s deprivations, repeating Chernyshevsky’s admonition, “Whoever can and has the strength, follow his path, for it is the only path for you that can lead us to the desired goal.”

  Leon Trotsky would later write, “We read What Is To Be Done? with ecstatic love and tried to imitate Rakhmetov in every way.” He added, “He was the future member of People’s Will.”

  Indeed, the future terrorist member of People’s Will. Chernyshevsky threw his bomb into the future from his cell.

  He handled himself regally at his trial. The Senate sentenced him to fourteen years at hard labor (reduced to seven), followed by exile.

  It drizzled in St. Petersburg on the day of Chernyshevsky’s banishment, a ceremony known as “civil execution.” A black pillory with chains topped the scaffold. A thousand admirers had gathered by eight in the morning: writers, editors, medical students, and officers. He was brought in a carriage, surrounded by mounted gendarmes. On the scaffold platform the executioner removed his hat and the sentence was read. “For criminal intent to overthrow the existing order,” he was stripped of “all rights of his estate” and sent “to hard labor” and then was “to be settled in Siberia forever.”

  The rain increased. Chernyshevsky wiped his wet faced and myopically wiped his fogged glasses. After reading the sentence, the executioner made Chernyshevsky kneel, broke a sword over his head, and put chains on his hands. It was pouring, and the executioner put Chernyshevsky’s hat on his head, for which Chernyshevsky thanked him politely and adjusted the brim, chains clanking.

  On his knees in the lashing rain, the creator of the iron Rakhmetov patiently waited for the end of the pillorying. The crowd waited silently with him. At the end, people rushed toward the carriage, but the mounted guards kept them away. The crowd threw flowers into the carriage.

  Chernyshevsky was sent to Siberia in leg irons, under an armed guard, and he spent almost twenty years there. The leaders of Land and Freedom were also arrested. Its main organizers, the Serno-Solovyovich brothers, were sentenced: Nikolai, thirty years old, philosopher and sociologist, was sent to eternal exile in Siberia, and his brother, Alexander, twenty-four, who had managed to leave Russia, was sentenced in absentia to eternal expulsion from Russia. Abroad, Alexander headed the young Russian community, while Nikolai soon died in Siberia.

  While myopic Chernyshevsky did his time, students remembered their favorite author in a popular drinking song:

  Let’s drink to the author of

  What Is To Be Done?

  To his heroes and his ideals.

  Ideals and ideas were favorite words among the young intelligentsia. They valued literature only if it was ideological. Even poetry had to be ideological for them.

  The leader of the new civic poetry, the idol of the nihilists, was the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, editor of the journal Sovremennik. “Muse of revenge and sorrow” is what Nekrasov called his poetry. His young followers, adept at deciphering Aesopian language, read the line as follows: “Revenge for the pitiless regime and sorrow for the impoverished people without rights.” “No Russian can look without love at that pale Muse, bloodied, lashed by the knout,” the poet wrote. His readers added “by the knout of the tsarist censors.”

  Nekrasov had some powerful and direct poems, which became proverbs and slogans. All the future terrorists knew these lines: “No heart can learn to love if it wearies of hatred,” and, “You will not die in vain, the act is solid when blood streams beneath it.”

  He formulated a new concept of poetry: “You don’t have to be a poet, but you must be a citizen.” The willful, imperious Muse of Pushkin, the Muse of Apollo, was declared an anachronistic, useless toy. She was replaced by Nekrasov’s Muse, who served society, who criticized power, the Muse of the new intelligentsia. Only that kind of poetry had the right to exist, because it was useful. “Useful” was the highest word of praise of the new youth and the new times.

  Nekrasov’s journal, Sovremennik, attacked everything that did not correspond to that civic approach. However, the great civic poet himself was not always the most luminous of men. He was a celebrated cardplayer and, rumor had it, a clever cardsharp. When he played in aristocratic clubs he had an enviable record of beating wealthy cardplayers, but managed to lose to “necessary people,” for example, the card-mad Count Alexander Adlerberg, son of the minister of the court. The count (who had been a childhood friend of the tsar) was very close to the emperor at that point.

  The “demon of self-security” (as Dostoevsky put it elegantly) or “greed for enrichment” (as Alexei Suvorin described it less elegantly) was always present for Nekrasov, who had known true poverty in his youth. The civic poet was a smart and ruthless businessman, a quality that was new among Russian writers.

  He had founded his journal with the writer Ivan Panayev. Soon after, as a contemporary wag put it, “I saw Nekrasov in Panayev’s carriage with Panayev’s wife.” Nekrasov took over the journal and made Panayev’s wife his mistress.

  One of his favorite poetic images was that of the mother. But when his own mother died, he did not go to her funeral. And when Panayeva, who had loved him faithfully, grew old and needed money, he did not help her. “You once dedicated your lyre to her, now give her a few rubles for rent,” a contemporary wrote angrily. He didn’t.

  Nekrasov’s chief devil was not greed. It was fear. Whi
le truly fearless in his poetry, in real life Nekrasov was a coward. Fearful for the continued existence of Sovremennik (and more important of himself), he sometimes denounced his own journal. In conversation with authorities, he complained about his unruly coworkers. This constant fear would make him shameful to all of reading Russia. But which of us who lived in the USSR would throw a stone at him?

  In a conversation Turgenev described the last pathetic cry of a hare chased (and caught) by borzoi hunting dogs. That image is always unconsciously present in everyone born in Russia. Nekrasov’s younger contemporary, Gleb Uspensky, wrote, “You must continually be afraid—that is the point of life in Russia. Fear, the sense of guilt for your very existence, have permeated all our thoughts, all our days and nights.”

  The epigraph to Nekrasov’s life could have come from Pushkin, the great poet he did not particularly care for. “But as soon as the Divine Word touches sensitive hearing, the poet’s soul starts to tremble.”

  The minute he started writing, he was transformed—there was his fiery hatred for injustice, his enormous love of Russia, and his constant repentance in his poetry. No Russian poet ever repented with such power and lyricism as Nekrasov. The Rasputin formulas of “If you don’t sin, you can’t repent” and “Where it’s vile, it’s also holy” accompanied Nekrasov throughout his life. It was an acrobatics of the soul: sin turned into an unusual repentance, and repentance poured out in immortal lines, the poetry becoming his confession, his plea for forgiveness. Dostoevsky protected his epilepsy, which sometimes gave rise to incredible insights, and Nekrasov protected his sins. Reading Dostoevsky, one understands a lot about Nekrasov.

  Nekrasov’s definition of Russia—“You are squalid, you are abundant, you are mighty, and you are impotent”—applies to himself, the great and miserable, very Russian man.