Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881

By Joseph Frank

This fifth and final volume of Joseph Frank's justly celebrated literary and cultural biography of Dostoevsky renders with a rare intelligence and grace the last decade of the writer's life, the years in which he wrote A Raw Youth, Diary of a Writer, and his crowning triumph: The Brothers Karamazov.


Dostoevsky's final years at last won him the universal approval toward which he had always aspired. While describing his idiosyncratic relationship to the Russian state, Frank also details Doestoevsky's continuing rivalries with Turgenev and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky's appearance at the Pushkin Festival in June 1880, which preceded his death by one year, marked the apotheosis of his career--and of his life as a spokesman for the Russian spirit. There he delivered his famous speech on Pushkin before an audience stirred to a feverish emotional pitch: "Ours is universality attained not by the sword, but by the force of brotherhood and of our brotherly striving toward the reunification of mankind." This is the Dostoevsky who has entered the patrimony of world literature, though he was not always capable of living up to such exalted ideals.


The writer's death in St. Petersburg in January of 1881 concludes this unparalleled literary biography--one truly worthy of Dostoevsky's genius and of the remarkable time and place in which he lived.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691209364

Book preview

necessary.

PART I

A New Beginning

Parched with the spirit’s thirst, I crossed

An endless desert sunk in gloom,

And a six-winged seraph came

Where the tracks met and I stood lost.

Fingers light as dream he laid

Upon my lids; I opened wide

My eagle eyes, and gazed around.

He laid his fingers on my ears

And they were filled with roaring sound:

I heard the music of the spheres,

The flight of angels through the skies,

The beasts that crept beneath the sea,

The heady uprush of the vine;

And, like a lover kissing me,

He rooted out this tongue of mine

Fluent in lies and vanity;

He tore my fainting lips apart

And, with his right hand steeped in blood,

He armed me with a serpent’s dart;

With his bright sword he split my breast;

My heart leapt to him with a bound;

A glowing livid coal he pressed

Into the hollow of the wound.

There in the desert I lay dead,

And God called out to me and said:

"Rise, prophet, rise, and hear, and see,

And let my works be seen and heard

By all who turn aside from me,

And burn them with my fiery word."

A. S. Pushkin, The Prophet

(trans. D. M. Thomas)

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The last ten years of Dostoevsky’s life, the subject of the present volume, mark the end of an extraordinary literary career and of a life that touched both the heights and depths of Russian society. It became customary during these years, even among people who disagreed (and sometimes quite violently) with Dostoevsky on social-political issues, to regard him with a certain reverence, and to feel that his words incarnated a prophetic vision illuminating Russia and its destiny. One of his favorite poems, which he often read aloud, was Pushkin’s powerfully evocative The Prophet; and each time he did so, his mesmerized listeners invariably felt that he was assuming this function himself. The unprecedented stature he attained astonished even his friends and admirers, and transcended all personal and political boundaries. In the eyes of the vast majority of the literate public, he became a living symbol of all the suffering that history had imposed on the Russian people, as well as of all their longing for an ideal world of (Christian) brotherly love and harmony.

A number of factors contributed to the unique status that Dostoevsky enjoyed during the 1870s. His now little-read Diary of a Writer, a monthly periodical written entirely by himself for two years, commented on the passing scene with passion, verve, and eloquence, and also included literary reminiscences, short stories, and sketches. This personal periodical was an enormous success, reaching a larger audience than any previous journal of comparable intellectual seriousness; and although many of its ideas do not represent Dostoevsky at his best, they elicited a wide response that made him the most important public voice of the time. It was the Diary of a Writer, in combination with his appearances on the platform as reader and speaker, that helped to create his prophetic status. Moreover, during the last two years of his life he held all of literate Russia spellbound with the monthly installments of his greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Its gripping theme placed the murder of a father in a vast religious and moral-philosophical context; and no Russian reader of the time could avoid associating its deeply probing pages with the increasingly frequent attempts then being made to assassinate the Tsar.

Nor was Dostoevsky averse to assuming such a prophetic role, one that he could well have felt had been accorded to him by destiny itself. His life had placed him in an extraordinary position from which to understand the problems of Russian society, and his artistic-ideological evolution embodies and expresses all the conflicts and contradictions that made up the panorama of Russian social-cultural life. Moreover, at no moment was Russian opinion more ready to seek guidance than in the crisis period the country was then living through. This stormy and unsettled time reached its climax, just a month after Dostoevsky’s own death, with the assassination of Alexander II, the Tsar-Liberator whom he revered.

To place Dostoevsky’s triumphal apotheosis in a proper perspective, let us glance briefly at his life up to this point. Born in 1821, he belonged to a family legally classified as nobility according to the table of ranks established by Peter the Great. But this was simply a civil service ranking and did not provide his family with a social status equal to that of the established gentry class of landowners from whom, for example, Turgenev and Tolstoy—Dostoevsky’s most important literary contemporaries—were descended. Mikhail Andreevich, Dostoevsky’s father, was an army doctor who had risen through the ranks, and his parents had belonged to the provincial clergy, a group in Russia whose prestige was far from elevated. The family of his mother was of the merchant class, and though it had acquired a certain degree of cultivation, this origin still placed it on the lower rungs of the Russian social ladder. Dostoevsky’s own position in the Russian hierarchy was thus ambiguous. He was legally, but not socially, equal to the scions of the gentry; and from remarks in a letter about Turgenev, we know how greatly he resented the superficial amiability of his typically aristocratic manners. The intensity of Dostoevsky’s feeling for the theme of humiliation thus very probably sprang from the anomalies of his own situation.

Whatever the personal moral defects of Dostoevsky’s father, which have been amply explored elsewhere, Mikhail Andreevich conscientiously looked after his family and provided his sons with the best possible education. He sent them to private schools to shield them from corporal punishment, and tutors came to the house to give instruction in French and religion. Dostoevsky recalled having learned to read from a religious primer, and he also remembered the annual pilgrimages with his pious mother to the monastery of the Trinity and Saint Sergei, about sixty versts from Moscow, as well as the visits to the many cathedrals within the city itself. He was thus taught to revere the Russian religious tradition, and attributed a decisive influence on his later development to these early impressions. This religious aspect of his education again sets him off from the usual pattern of the gentry class (though not all, to be sure, since the devout Slavophils were of the same stock). But for the most part, religious faith among the upper class had been undermined by Voltaire and eighteenth-century French thought, and gentry children received very little, if any, instruction in religion, whose precepts of self-sacrifice and reverence for martyrdom they absorbed mainly from their servants.

Dostoevsky’s father had destined his two older sons, Mikhail and Feodor, for military careers, and Feodor succeeded in passing the examination for entrance into the Academy for Military Engineers in St. Petersburg. He thus received the education of an officer and a gentleman, though he had no interest whatever in military engineering and apparently no talent for it either. Luckily, the academy also included courses in Russian and French literature, and he emerged with both a genuine appreciation of French Classicism (he particularly admired Racine), as well as an increased knowledge of the very latest productions of socially progressive writers like George Sand and Victor Hugo, with whom he was already partially familiar. Literature had been his passion ever since learning to read, and he had long ago decided that he wanted to become a writer like his idol, Pushkin; he said that if he were not already wearing mourning for his mother, who died in 1837, he would have worn it when Pushkin was killed in a duel in the same year. One of Dostoevsky’s greatest public triumphs, just a year before his death in 1881, was the speech he made at the ceremonies accompanying the dedication of a monument to Pushkin in Moscow.

Long believed, according to local rumor, to have been murdered by his serfs, though officially reported as being overcome by an apoplectic stroke, Dostoevsky’s father went to his grave in 1839. Some recent investigation has cast doubt on the murder story, based entirely on hearsay and rejected by a judicial investigation at the time; but it has been extremely popular since Freud’s famous article on Dostoevsky and Parricide. It cannot be established whether Dostoevsky himself believed the rumors, well known to the family, that his father had been murdered. A small income from the estate allowed him to resign his army commission in 1844, primarily, no doubt, to devote himself to literature, but also because one of his official duties—the supervision of the disciplinary punishment of flogging—had revolted him to the core. He had begun to write seriously years before, and two of his poetic tragedies, the most prestigious literary genre of the time, have regrettably been lost. He was soon swept up, however, in the new literary movement sponsored by the fiery critic Vissarion Belinsky, who had become converted to Utopian Socialism. Belinsky urged the members of the new Russian literary generation to turn their attention to the world around them, and particularly to follow the lead of the Gogol of The Overcoat and Dead Souls in revealing the glaring injustices of Russian society. Gogol was very far from being a progressive (quite the contrary!), and his intention was satirical and comic rather than subversive; but his sharp eye for the incongruities of Russian society objectively exposed all of its morally abhorrent reality.

The young writers who grouped themselves around Belinsky’s program came to be known as the Natural School, and they included many of the important creators of the nineteenth-century Russian novel—Turgenev and Goncharov as well as Dostoevsky, not to mention the civic poet Nekrasov. Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk (1845), was hailed by Belinsky as the most important work so far produced under his inspiration, and it immediately brought the young author into the forefront of the Russian literary scene. His personal acquaintance with Belinsky—a vibrantly powerful personality, who left an indelible impression both on his friends and on his time—was to prove of the utmost importance for shaping his own moral-spiritual and ideological evolution. The Diary of a Writer abounds in references to Belinsky, and one article in particular, recording a conversation with the great critic some thirty years earlier, contains the nucleus of what was to become the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.

Poor Folk already exemplifies certain features that were to continue to distinguish Dostoevsky’s literary artistry. Written in the form of an exchange of letters, it illustrates his preference for a poetics of subjectivity in which his characters directly express their innermost thoughts and feelings; and he will continue to favor dramatic monologues or dialogues, rather than third-person expository narration, in all of his later novels. Even when he uses a third-person narrator, as in his next work, The Double, this narrator is never a purely objective, detached observer; he blends with the character’s consciousness in a manner anticipating later developments of the stream-of-consciousness technique. The Double was not a success, however, being roundly pummeled by Belinsky for centering on an atypical psychopathic character—a criticism that continued to be leveled against him throughout his life. Between 1845 and 1849 he tried his hand at various types of stories, but these did not succeed in raising a reputation badly damaged by Belinsky’s strictures. They failed primarily because they no longer provided the obvious social pathos so movingly expressed in Poor Folk; but Dostoevsky had not lost interest in the social issues then agitating the Russian intelligentsia. He was, rather, experimenting with artistic modes that expressed them more indirectly through their effect on character and personality.

In 1847 he began to frequent the meetings of the Petrashevsky circle, a group of young men who gathered once a week for conviviality and conversation, and who were known as disciples of one or another school of Utopian Socialism (the theories of Charles Fourier predominated). Dostoevsky did not become a convert to any of these schools and shared the opinion of his friend, the young literary critic Valerian Maikov, that each placed too many constraints on the freedom of the individual to be completely acceptable. (This concern for the freedom of the individual was later to become one of the dominating leitmotifs of Dostoevsky’s work.) Nonetheless, he received a thorough schooling in Socialist thought, and this indoctrination left a permanent impress on his ideas and values. The notion of a utopian transformation of earthly life into what would be, in effect, a realization of the Christian ideal of Paradise as a realm of mutual love never ceased to haunt his imagination—though it is very far from clear to what extent he literally believed this might be possible.

The somewhat desultory discussions at the Petrashevsky gatherings became much more animated as a result of the European revolutions of 1848, and the wave of uprisings that swept over Europe did not fail to lap, though feebly, at the shores of Russia. The Petrashevsky, to be sure, were dedicated to peaceful persuasion; but Nikolay Speshnev, probably the prototype of the character of Stavrogin in The Devils—and whom Dostoevsky at this time called his Mephistopheles—formed a small, secret society inside the larger circle. The purpose of this underground group was to circulate propaganda among the peasantry aimed at stirring up a revolution against serfdom. Dostoevsky rarely participated in the theoretical public discussions of the larger gatherings; but on the few occasions when he did speak, it was to castigate, with passionate indignation, the intolerable injustice of this keystone of the Russian social order. It is thus not surprising that he joined Speshnev’s revolutionary group and tried to recruit others to the cause.

In 1849 the Petrashevsky were rounded up by the secret police of Nicholas I, who had decided, in view of the revolutionary groundswell sweeping over Europe, not to tolerate any longer even the discussion of such subversive ideas. However, the existence of the genuinely revolutionary organization in their midst, though suspected, was not discovered in the investigation that ensued, and only uncovered in 1922; indeed, it was not until 1956 that the names of all the seven members came to light. Dostoevsky lived all his life with the knowledge that he had once himself been a revolutionary, who had not recoiled at the idea of bloodshed; and his profound understanding of the psychology of characters attracted to radical ideas may surely be attributed to such a history.

His arrest and its aftermath unquestionably became one of the defining moments (perhaps the defining moment) of his life. He was submitted—along with all the others—to the ordeal of a mock execution, and he stood in the second row of those presumably to be shot. He was convinced that his life was shortly to be snuffed out; but though the terror of the moment is communicated in The Idiot, it is clear, from the recollections of a fellow Petrashevist, that he also believed in some form of afterlife. To the convinced atheist Speshnev, he said, We shall be with Christ. But the latter only replied ironically, pointing to the ground, A handful of dust. This confrontation with eternity marked the transition between the Dostoevsky of the 1840s—a Christian, to be sure, but one essentially focused on the problems of earthly life—and the later Dostoevsky, for whom the origins of the world and of human existence, as he wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, lay in other, unearthly realms. The religious-metaphysical Dostoevsky of the great novels emerged from this sadistic charade staged by Nicholas I, though its effects would take a long while to be assimilated and mastered for artistic purposes.

The next four years are of equal importance, but on a different level. Dostoevsky was sent to Siberia and lived in a prison camp, mainly with peasant convicts, many of whom had committed murder. Dostoevsky was thus placed in a situation that few other members of his class had ever been forced to endure, and he always attributed the greatest importance to this exposure—on the basis of a status of equality if not inferiority—to the grim realities of Russian peasant life. He felt that he had acquired a special insight into the Russian folk character as a result of his travails, and that his Calvary, as he later wrote in the Diary of a Writer, had led to the regeneration of [his] convictions.

Dostoevsky had assumed that members of the upper-class intelligentsia could lead the social revolution that he and the Speshnev group had been planning. Through bitter personal experience, he now discovered that the cultural and spiritual gap between the classes was so enormous that no genuine understanding between them was possible; and he became convinced that no tolerable Russian future could begin until this gap was bridged. On a more personal level, his intuition of the importance for the human personality of a sense of its own freedom, already present in his rejection of Socialist blueprints, was immensely broadened and deepened. His observations of his fellow convicts revealed that freedom of the will was not only a social desiderata, not only a religious postulate, but a primordial need of the human personality. Acts that might seem senseless or irrational to a superficial observer sprang irresistibly, among the imprisoned convicts guarded night and day, from the poignant hysterical craving for self-expression, the unconscious yearning for [one]self, the desire . . . to assert [a] crushed personality, a desire which suddenly takes possession of [someone] and reaches the pitch of fury, of spite, of mental aberration (4: 66–67). Dostoevsky compared this uncontrollable fury to the reaction of a man buried alive and hopelessly beating on the lid of his coffin; the certain knowledge of futility would not restrain his visceral desperation. From that time on, the notion that rationality or reasonableness could be counted on as a controlling and dominant force in human life seemed to him the height of folly.

At first appalled by the barbarities of his peasant fellow prisoners, Dostoevsky’s attitude toward them gradually changed. He came to understand that many of their crimes had been provoked by, and were a revolt against, the pitiless cruelties they had been forced to endure; and he began to detect (or believed he could detect), underneath the brutalities of their surface behavior, the kindness and gentleness he had encountered long ago among the peasants on his father’s small estate. In a revelatory sketch, The Peasant Marey, Dostoevsky depicts his revulsion at the spectacle of the drunkenly carousing peasant convicts on a feast day; but then he recalled the tenderness of Marey, his father’s serf, who had calmed and blessed him as a frightened child. Were not all these roisterous savages so many Mareys, if one could look into their hearts? All the more so because, whatever their crimes, they always recognized them as such, and when [at Easter], with the chalice in his hands, the priest read the words ‘accept me, O Lord, even as the thief,’ almost all of them bowed down to the ground with the clanking of chains (4: 177). Dostoevsky’s faith in the innately Christian virtues of the Russian peasantry, which he felt he could discern even under the repellent exteriors of hardened peasant criminals, was never shaken in the future and became a crucial—if highly questionable—cornerstone of his later ideology.

On returning to Russia in 1860, after serving for six years as a common soldier and an officer in the Russian Army, Dostoevsky found the social-cultural atmosphere entirely changed. He belonged to the generation of the 1840s, which had been inspired by a French Utopian Socialism imbued with a veneration for Christ, and whose philosophical ideas had been absorbed from the spacious metaphysical horizons of the German Idealism of Hegel, Schelling, and Schiller. A new generation, that of the 1860s, now dominated Russian cultural life; and its leaders, Nikolay Chernyshevsky and N. A. Dobrolyubov, were the sons of priestly families. Educated in religious seminaries but disillusioned with the church, they had been converted to social-political radicalism and sought their philosophical nurture in the atheism of Feuerbach, the materialism and rationalism of eighteenth-century French thought, and the English Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. Russian radicalism thus acquired a new ideological basis, which was formulated by Chernyshevsky as a doctrine of rational egoism.

At the same time, the social-political climate of the country was also undergoing a momentous change. The new Tsar, Alexander II, had decided to abolish serfdom, and this great event, which took place relatively peacefully in 1861, made a profound impression on Dostoevsky. He had been sent to Siberia because of his hatred of this detestable enslavement of the vast majority of the population, and it had been eliminated by the hand of the Tsar—without the bloody revolutions that had been required to improve the conditions of the lower classes in Europe (not to mention the Civil War then raging in the United States). Dostoevsky was thus confirmed even more strongly in his conviction, which he had expressed as early as his Petrashevsky days, that Russia need not look to Europe for the solution to its indigenous social problems. Moreover, he had long since become convinced that the Russian people (the peasants) would not respond to revolutionary agitators from the intelligentsia propagating essentially European panaceas. What he feared most was that such agitation would slow down or obstruct the reforms that the Tsar-Liberator was pursuing, not only with regard to the serfs but also in the army, the court system, and other areas of government.

Dostoevsky returned to the literary life of the early 1860s as the editor of two journals, Vremya (Time) and Epokha (Epoch), which advocated a doctrine called pochvennichestvo (from pochva, native soil). It urged the Europeanized Russian intelligentsia, and the upper class in general, to return to the values of their native soil. In their turn, the intelligentsia would bring home from their European education the presumably civilizing benefits of their cultivation; but this latter aspect of the program became less and less significant as time went on. For Dostoevsky, the alienated intelligentsia were obligated to take the first step toward bridging the abyss by assimilating the beliefs and psychology of the people, rooted in their traditional religious faith. The radicals, on the other hand, having become dissatisfied with the economic terms under which the serfs had been liberated, were attempting to stir up trouble; and Dostoevsky opposed their agitations because they were provoking the reaction that he feared. More important, though, the doctrine of rational egoism clashed sharply and profoundly with the reshaping of his convictions that had resulted from his arrest and prison camp years. To believe that all the needs and desires of the human personality could be satisfied by reason was for him the most short-sighted naïveté; and to take egoism as the basis of a moral philosophy was not simply self-contradictory but could justify the worst abuses. After Siberia, Dostoevsky had come to regard the Christian values of love and self-sacrifice as an ineradicable possession of the Russian moral-social psyche, and as the sole ray of light shining in the midst of the surrounding moral darkness.

House of the Dead, a semifictional autobiography of his prison camp experiences, was hailed unanimously and restored Dostoevsky’s literary reputation. Written in a style totally different from the psychological explorations of his novels, it also reveals the versatility of his talent; and this sharply observed and objectively written memoir was greatly admired by Tolstoy, who was quite critical of certain features of the better-known fiction. No one before had ever exposed this secluded world of the prison camps, or exhibited so much understanding and sympathy for its inhabitants. Dostoevsky’s next important work, his novella Notes from Underground, went largely unnoticed, but is now rightly considered a highly original creation. The predecessor of a whole line of modern portraits of cynical and atrabilious characters, it is also the prelude to Dostoevsky’s own great creative period.

Here he launches a full-scale attack against the premises of radical ideology by dramatizing its consequences on the personality of his now-famous underground man. He penetratingly depicts a character filled with repressed resentment and rage against both himself and others, and traces all his malignant traits to the acceptance of certain radical ideas. No other writer equals Dostoevsky in his ability to portray this relation between ideas and their effects on the human personality. What would it really mean for human behavior if one accepted, as does the underground man, Chernyshevsky’s denial of the reality of freedom of the will? Part 1 of this work, the most influential, portrays the underground man’s struggle as a human being to reconcile himself emotionally to all the real-life implications of such a doctrine (though it does so in such a tortuous and involuted fashion that this ideological source can be easily overlooked). Nonetheless, this discovery of the relation between ideology and psychology, or rather, Dostoevsky’s genius for portraying all the subtle intricacies of their involvement, became the hallmark of his particular talent and opened the way for his great novelistic creations.

The three novels he wrote between 1865 and 1871 all follow in the path first trodden by Notes from Underground. Crime and Punishment takes its point of departure from the Utilitarian component of radical ideology—one death and a hundred lives in exchange, it’s simple arithmetic—combined with the ideas of another influential radical, Dimitry Pisarev, who had sketched the outlines of a new proto-Nietzschean hero, an embryonic Superman, for whom good and evil, including murder, is only a matter of taste and personal inclination. Raskolnikov had thus imagined himself as a great man dedicated to improving the lot of humanity; but he discovers that a true great man cares nothing for others, and that he cannot become one precisely because he is psychically unable to eliminate the moral component of his personality. Caught in this treacherous dialectic of radical ideas, Raskolnikov finds it impossible to suppress his inherited Christian conscience; and the portrayal of his inner struggle has no equal this side of Macbeth.

In The Idiot, Dostoevsky attempts to depict his own ideal as a perfectly beautiful man, the Christ-figure of Prince Myshkin, whose radiance inspires others but who himself comes to grief because the universality of his Christian compassion proves incompatible with the limitations of his earthly nature as a human being. In the only direct statement he ever made of his religious convictions, jotted in a notebook while keeping a vigil at the bier of his first wife, Dostoevsky wrote: "To love man like oneself, according to the commandment of Christ, is impossible. The law of personality on earth shackles one. The Ego stands in the way. . . . [B]ut Christ was a perpetual eternal ideal to which man strives and, according to the law of nature [presumably human nature], should strive" (20: 172). These melancholy reflections are dramatized in the history of Prince Myshkin, certainly the most poignant Christian hero in all of modern literature, whose psychology is shaped by Dostoevsky’s own ponderings over the meaning of Christ’s incarnation for human life.

The Idiot was written during Dostoevsky’s four-year sojourn abroad (1867–1871), originally planned as a short vacation trip but prolonged for fear of being thrown into debtor’s prison on return. These were years of genteel poverty and isolation, relieved only by the companionship of Anna Grigoryevna, his staunchly loyal, devoted, and much younger second wife, who became his amanuensis as well. It was also the period of his gambling fever, a sporadic indulgence given far too much attention by biographers searching for the key to his work in some pathological aspect of his personality. One might keep in mind that in these years he wrote The Idiot under extremely difficult practical circumstances, as well as two brilliant novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. He also sketched out notes for a never-written major work in several volumes, The Life of a Great Sinner, on which he drew for both The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov.

He began to write The Devils while still abroad, and with this coruscating creation, probably the greatest novel ever written about political conspiracy, he returned to the attack on radical ideology initiated earlier. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky had only imagined that radical ideas could lead to murder, but now an underground group led by Sergey Nechaev had assassinated one of its own members, presumably through fear of betrayal. Dostoevsky seized on this event as a confirmation of his own worst fears about the morally dangerous effects of radical principles, which during his years of exile he had come to regard as an infection of European society now spread to the Russian body politic. Intending at first to dash off a quick political pamphlet about the Nechaev affair, he found the work growing in scope and complexity; and it took much longer to complete than he had planned.

Ultimately, it became in part a reworking of the conflict-of-generations theme so impressively handled by Turgenev in Fathers and Children, but grasped at a later stage. The weak-willed, ridiculous but charming, and fundamentally humane Liberal Idealist Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky personifies the generation of the 1840s; the totally cynical and ruthless machinations of his son Peter (who applies Nechaev’s pitilessly Machiavellian ideas and provokes the murder) represent the disastrous culmination of the rational egoism of the generation of the 1860s. This theme is combined with that of Stavrogin, a character taken over from The Life of a Great Sinner—a glamorous Byronic dandy à la Eugene Onegin, who has lost his religious faith and futilely seeks for a cause to which he can devote his strength. The Devils is the most intellectually rich of the great novels, practically an encyclopedia of Russian nineteenth-century culture filtered through a witheringly derisive and often grotesquely funny perspective. No other novel so amply displays Dostoevsky’s underestimated talents as a satirist.

Dostoevsky returned to Russia in 1871 with The Devils only half written, and its completion in 1872 began a new phase in his artistic-ideological career. For he discovered that Russian radicalism had now developed views that, at least partially, were far closer to his own than in the past. Notably, the radicals were now willing to accept the validity of Christian moral values (though not the religion itself). These were the very values previously scorned and discarded, and which Dostoevsky had defended and propagated in his works all through the 1860s. His writings during the 1870s would thus be strongly affected by this mutation in radical ideology, and even lead to a temporary alliance with the left-wing Populists, in whose journal Otechestvenniye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) he published his next novel. The prophetic status that Dostoevsky now attained may be attributed in part to this alteration in the radical point of view, whose adherents would no longer automatically reject out of hand any utterances couched in terms of Christian morality. But this brings us to the beginning of the present volume, and to these astonishing last ten years of Dostoevsky’s life, which culminated, not only in personal triumph, but in The Brothers Karamazov, his artistic response of genius to all their tormenting agitations.

CHAPTER 2

A Quiet Return

On July 8, 1871, Dostoevsky and his family returned to Russia after a four-year period of living abroad, making as unobtrusive a reentry as possible into the St. Petersburg he had quit presumably only for a summer vacation. Eleven years earlier, in 1860, he had come back to European Russia after an even longer absence—the ten years he had spent in Siberia, four in a prison camp serving a sentence of hard labor, and six as a soldier and then an officer in the Russian Army. His return at that time had been equally unremarked, but for different reasons. Dostoevsky’s artistic reputation had suffered a steep decline by the time of his arrest in 1849, and he was generally considered to have been a literary flash in the pan who had failed to live up to his earlier promise.

Since then, however, Dostoevsky’s literary stature had changed drastically; in 1871 he was unanimously recognized as a worthy rival to both Turgenev and Tolstoy. His fame had been reestablished by his first post-Siberian novel, The Insulted and Injured, and particularly by his unprecedented semidocumentary prison camp memoirs, House of the Dead. Even though his Notes from Underground had gone largely unremarked, Crime and Punishment had been a great success; and although The Idiot had received a mixed reception, it was treated with great respect even by such a social-political opponent as the great satirist Mikhail E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. By the summer of 1871, Dostoevsky had already published all of Part I and two chapters of Part II of his latest novel, The Devils, whose plot made spine-chilling use of the most spectacular event of the moment, the murder of a young student by members of the radical Nechaev group. Indeed, the public trial of the Nechaevtsy was taking place at the very moment of Dostoevsky’s arrival in the capital, and some of the essential documents, including the cold-bloodedly Machiavellian Catechism of a Revolutionary (written by either Mikhail Bakunin or Sergey Nechaev, and perhaps both) were placed in evidence and made publicly available on the very day that Dostoevsky stepped off the train.

Dostoevsky’s reappearance would thus certainly have attracted more attention if he had let his plans become known in advance, but he had carefully kept them concealed. He had left Russia saddled with the financial debts of his brother Mikhail, which he had assumed after the latter’s sudden death in 1864, and he had been threatened with imprisonment because of them. Indeed, only by quitting the country had he escaped being thrown into debtor’s prison; and he stayed away as long as he did because he feared that otherwise the threat would be carried out. The obscurity of his homecoming was thus a protection against a swarm of creditors immediately appearing and clamoring to be paid—a situation that he knew would disturb the tranquillity he needed to continue work on the unfinished novel that was his sole source of income. Only his immediate relatives and a few close friends were informed in advance that he would be in Petersburg again—as well as the editors of the Russian Messenger, the journal in which The Devils was being published. He thus managed to conceal his presence in his homeland for two months, until his whereabouts became known in September through mention in a newspaper.

2

The first problem facing the Dostoevskys was to find suitable lodgings and settle down as quickly as possible. They stayed in a hotel for two days and then rented two furnished rooms near Yusupov Park, where their daughter Lyubov could gambol amidst the cooling greenery during the stifling summer heat. Assailed by visits from relatives and friends, as Dostoevsky complains in a letter to his favorite niece, Sofya Ivanova, there was hardly any time to sleep.¹ In the midst of this overwhelming conviviality, Anna Grigoryevna suddenly felt labor pains at dinner and gave birth to a son, Feodor, on July 16, happily without suffering the severe contractions of her earlier pregnancies. Dostoevsky was overjoyed and hastened to convey the good news to Anna’s mother (then temporarily abroad) and to his family in Moscow. In his letter to Sofya Ivanova, he also informed her that he was planning to travel to Moscow for a visit with Mikhail Katkov, the powerful editor of the Russian Messenger, about business matters. For despite this whirlwind of family events, it was necessary for him to carry on with the serialization of The Devils. I am sitting down to work now, he tells his niece on July 18, although my head isn’t clear and I fully expect an attack [of epilepsy]. Everything here is chaos, the servant is awful, and I am constantly running errands.²

A week later, at the end of July, Dostoevsky was in Moscow to straighten out his accounts with Katkov, receiving payment for the chapters he had supplied in recent months. The new supply of funds, skimpy though it was, enabled the Dostoevskys to envisage moving from their furnished flat, which was very expensive, full of comings and goings, and owned by nasty Yids.³ The very practical Anna Grigoryevna, who had made a quick recovery after the birth of Feodor, immediately tackled the problem. Since they had no furniture and not enough funds to buy any outright, Anna struck a deal with a merchant who agreed to provide what was needed (though of very inferior quality) in return for installment payments that allowed him to retain ownership until the price had been paid in full. (This fortuitous arrangement turned out to be very advantageous for the Dostoevskys in the short run.) Once assured of the furniture, Anna began to hunt for an apartment and was considerably put out when Dostoevsky’s stepson, Pasha (Pavel), suggested one with eight rooms that he had managed to turn up.

Pasha had lived with his stepfather previously. Indeed, one of the reasons they had initially planned to vacation abroad was Anna’s determination to break the hold he had managed to obtain over her husband—a hold that, she had become convinced, posed a serious threat to her marriage. Even though now married himself, Pasha seemed to assume he could resume his old status as a prizhivalchik, a sponger or hanger-on. But Anna, who had been reduced to tears by Pasha’s reproaches four years earlier in the first days of her marriage, was now in full command of the situation. In no uncertain terms, she explained that setting up a common household was out of the question. An appeal to Dostoevsky was enough to convince Pasha that the old days would never return: he was told curtly that his stepfather had turned over the entire household management to [Anna] and that however she decides, that’s the way it will be.⁴

Pasha, however, still persisted in applying to his stepfather for financial aid, and Dostoevsky continued not only to help him when temporary shortfalls occurred but also to assist him in obtaining employment through mutual friends. Several notes written shortly after his return document such recommendations; but the feckless Pasha never stayed long in any employment, much to his stepfather’s exasperation, and continually offered one excuse after another for his repeated dissatisfactions with his posts.

If Pasha still clung to Dostoevsky’s coattails in this way, the situation was greatly improved, from Anna’s point of view, regarding the family of his late brother Mikhail. Not only had Dostoevsky assumed his brother’s debts, but he had also felt responsible for supporting the surviving family as much as he could. Even during the darkest days of his penury in Europe, he had driven Anna into a repressed fury (indignantly confided only to her notebooks) by assigning them a small portion of whatever income he earned. Mikhail’s children, however, were now all fully grown and self-supporting; and, as Anna notes with relief, their mother, Emilya Feodorovna, had become accustomed to the idea that Feodor Mikhailovich, having a family of his own, could help her out only in special cases.⁵

Anna soon turned up a very suitable four-room dwelling and rented it in her own name. Presumably, she did so to spare Dostoevsky the bother of the legal formalities; but once again her assumption of ownership, perhaps more calculated than she admits, would work to ward off the greatest threat to his peace of mind. Although forced to buy furniture, Anna believed she could retrieve the dinnerware and kitchen utensils, as well as the winter clothing, left in the care of relatives and friends four years earlier. But all had been lost—through careless reshufflings, the clumsiness of servants who had broken precious porcelain and glassware, or what seemed like outright dishonesty in the failure to pay insurance premiums sent from abroad. Worst of all was the loss of Dostoevsky’s library, which had been left in the care of Pasha on condition that he preserve it intact; but it had been sold piecemeal and irretrievably scattered. Anna mentions as of particular value the books inscribed by other writers, "serious works on history and on the sect of Old Believers [raskolniki], in which [my husband] took an intense interest."⁶ This remark confirms Dostoevsky’s fascination, quite evident in his work, with the messianic religiosity of the Old Believers, whom he had come more and more to regard as the genuine repository of Old Russian values. A small consolation in the midst of general disappointment was the discovery of a basket in the attic of Anna’s relatives containing the notebooks for Crime and Punishment, a good deal of correspondence, and the account books of Dostoevsky’s journals.

At the end of September, he filed suit against the publisher Feodor Stellovsky, who had clearly violated a contract by publishing a new edition of Crime and Punishment without any payment to the author. But it would take several years before Dostoevsky would succeed in obtaining a penny from the rapacious publisher for whom he had been forced to write The Gambler in a month. Just about the same time, news of his return was published, and the expected did not fail to occur: creditors immediately began to hammer at his door. One of the most importunate was the widow of a certain G. Hinterlach, who had been involved in dealings with Mikhail Dostoevsky at the time the latter had owned a tobacco factory. She sent a threatening letter; and when Dostoevsky visited her to ask for an extension of a few months, by which time he expected to receive additional payment from Katkov, he was turned away unceremoniously. He returned home in despair, fearing that Frau Hinterlach would attach his property and, if this proved insufficient, send him to languish in prison.

Returning to plead again for payment by installments, he was answered, according to Anna, with the boast that a little German merchant like Hinterlach could put a prominent Russian author in jail—and would do so unless promptly paid! This was just after the [German] victory in the Franco-Prussian War, Anna comments, when all the Germans grew arrogant and haughty. By this time she had decided to take matters into her own hands and, without informing her husband, paid a visit herself to the implacable lady. Instead of pleading, she advised her that the household furnishings and the Dostoevsky apartment were both in Anna’s name, which meant that neither could be assigned for a debt owed by her husband. Moreover, if Dostoevsky were put in debtor’s prison, Anna would insist that he remain there until the entire debt was canceled. Besides not obtaining a cent, Frau Hinterlach would also have to foot the cost of the prisoner’s upkeep (as the law required of creditors using such a recourse). Anna also threatened to air the whole matter in an article for a journal: Let everybody see what the honest Germans are capable of!⁷ Realizing that Anna was made of sterner stuff than the nervous and distraught Dostoevsky, the creditor hastened to accept the installment arrangement. After this experience, Anna decided to take over all the debt negotiations; and, meeting the threats with the same arguments, she succeeded in stalling off demands for payment on the spot.

Dostoevsky was busily at work on The Devils all this while; but he was also eager to renew relations with old friends and to make up for the cultural isolation from which he had suffered during his European sojourn. The poet Apollon Maikov, his staunchest friend and most faithful correspondent during his years abroad, introduced Dostoevsky to a literary-political circle that had gathered around Prince V. P. Meshchersky, who had founded a new publication, Grazhdanin (The Citizen), to counter the influence of the liberal and progressive press (though Meshchersky’s opinion of what was liberal and progressive included journals that the radical intelligentsia regarded as pillars of reaction). Prince Meshchersky was little known except as the scion of an ancient aristocratic family, the grandson of Nikolay M. Karamzin, the famous early-nineteenth-century writer and historian, whose works the youthful Dostoevsky had read with admiration; but he soon achieved some notoriety as the author of novels and plays about high-society life in St. Petersburg. He was also a close friend of the heir to the Russian throne, Tsarevich Alexander, whom he had known since boyhood, and he moved freely and easily in the very highest court circles.*

If we are to believe his memoirs, Meshchersky’s decision to found a weekly journal that would support the monarchy was met with indifference, if not outright disapproval, by those he wished to champion. The Tsar referred disdainfully to the prince’s desire to become a scribbler (pisaka), and only the Tsarevich encouraged his journalistic ambition.⁸ Nonetheless, he gathered around him a small literary circle that included Maikov, the great poet Feodor I. Tyutchev, Nikolay Strakhov (the former chief critic of Dostoevsky’s journals), Dostoevsky himself, and the tutor of the Tsarevich, Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev. Pobedonostsev later acquired a sinister reputation when his former pupil succeeded to the throne as Alexander III, and the ex-tutor became known as the malevolent éminence grise of his oppressive régime. But in 1871 he was regarded primarily as a legal scholar and highly placed government official with a liberal past (in the Russian sense), who had supported the cause of judicial reform and the abolition of serfdom. He was also extremely cultivated, had read widely in English, French, and German literature, and had published a translation of Thomas à Kempis in 1869. This was the literary-political environment in which Dostoevsky was to be immersed during the next three years.

3

At the beginning of the New Year, Dostoevsky made another trip to Moscow, again to meet Katkov and to obtain, if possible, an additional advance; but he was also concerned about the fate of two recent chapters he had submitted, entitled either At Tikhon’s or, more familiarly, Stavrogin’s Confession. These contained a description of how Stavrogin, a central character in The Devils, had seduced a twelve-year-old girl and then, realizing that she was going to commit suicide, had not only failed to intervene but even listened with perversely sadistic anticipation to the sounds of her preparation and death agony. There was some question, for reasons that are quite understandable, whether these chapters were not too scabrous to be published; but Dostoevsky did not receive a definitive answer about them until nine months later. Meanwhile, a letter to his wife from Moscow leaves in doubt whether he was able to obtain any more funds. He mentions only learning that my accounts are in a big mess and that apparently there must be 1,300 rubles that I owe (advances not yet repaid by his manuscript). Despite visiting relatives for the New Year’s celebration and renewing acquaintance both with the playwright Dimitry V. Averkiev (whose current play he attended) and the Slavophil publicist Ivan Aksakov, he remarks that all in all, I’m miserable here, and the main thing is the complete uncertainty. Dostoevsky’s letters to Anna from this time on are always filled with anxious concern about her and the children, and he inquires constantly after their health and well-being, interspersing his queries with practical advice: How is Fedya? Is he well? Is it warm there? Stoke the fire, darling, if it is the least bit cold there. Or again: Feed them well, Anya. Don’t skimp on beef.⁹

1. Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev

No information is offered about the final results of Dostoevsky’s conversations with Katkov, though he felt encouraged by one incident. Katkov’s relation to him and his work was obviously of the first importance for his financial future, and he took as a very promising sign that I told Katkov, tête-à-tête, the plot of my next novel and I have heard from Averkiev that he had already told two people of the plot.¹⁰ Whether this next novel has anything to do with A Raw Youth remains unclear; ideas for novels were always piling up in Dostoevsky’s notebooks, many of them to remain unwritten, and Dostoevsky may well have spoken of some of these. Katkov, however, clearly wished to retain him as a future collaborator; but Dostoevsky also discovered to his distress that the financial side of the journal had been turned over to a certain Pavel Leontiyev, a scholar of Latin, Greek, and ancient history, to whom Katkov himself voluntarily yielded despotic power in the matter [of payment to authors]. Thus, everything depends on Leontiyev’s consent, and I cannot be certain of that man’s favor.¹¹

In early February, however, Dostoevsky wrote happily to Sofya Ivanova that, thanks to a certain occurrence, my affairs have improved. . . . I have gotten some money and satisfied the most impatient creditors.¹² His discretion about this certain occurrence can be explained by a letter published for the first time only in the most recent edition of his correspondence. Addressed to A. A. Romanov, the Tsarevich, it also refers to an earlier letter, so far undiscovered, to the same august personage. The published document expresses Dostoevsky’s embarrassment at the boldness I exhibited, and one can only assume that (probably on the advice and with the help of the good offices of both Prince Meshchersky and Pobedonostsev) he had been urged to explain all the difficulties of his circumstances to the Tsarevich, and that the heir to the throne had come to his aid with a grant of money. Dostoevsky thanked the Tsarevich above all for the priceless attention . . . paid to my request. It is dearer to me than anything else, dearer than the very help that You gave me and which saved me from a great calamity.¹³ He had appealed once before to the throne, in 1859, when he was serving as a common soldier and wished promotion to the rank of officer. As a loyal subject, he had felt no hesitation or reluctance then; nor, presumably, did he feel any now. But the request for aid did not prevent him from composing the scathingly hilarious indictment of the incompetence of Governor-General von Lembke, along with his entire administration, in chapters of The Devils that are bitingly satirical of the reigning authorities.

One result of this sudden and welcome access of funds was that Dostoevsky could at last pay off a debt to an old friend, Dr. Stepan D. Yanovsky. During a difficult period for the couple in Geneva, the prosperous Yanovsky had responded to a plea for help by sending one hundred rubles; he was now in poor health and had written in January asking for repayment of this old loan. Dostoevsky replied with the dispatch of the money, accompanied by an extremely cordial letter evoking their forty-year friendship and bringing Yanovsky up to date on more recent events. I spent four years abroad, he wrote, in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, and I finally got terribly fed up with it. I began to notice with horror that I was getting out of touch with Russia. Dostoevsky remarks that he hopes to finish his new novel by summer (it would not be completed until the winter of 1872) and mentions an old plan of going to the East (Constantinople, the Greek Archipelago, Athos, Jerusalem) and writing a book about the trip. Of great interest is a reference to the 1840s, when Yanovsky had been Dostoevsky’s personal physician. You loved me and put up with me, the ex-patient recalls gratefully, a person suffering from a mental illness (after all, I recognize that now), before my journey to Siberia, where I was cured.¹⁴ Dostoevsky thus makes a clear separation, in his own mind, between his mental illness of the 1840s, which some biographers—as well as Freud—tend to see as the first syndromes of his epilepsy, and the epilepsy itself: the latter had begun in his Siberian prison camp, while in fact the symptoms of his former nervous troubles had vanished there for good and all.

Hard at work on The Devils, Dostoevsky pleaded lack of time in refusing an invitation to become a contributor to a new publication, Beseda (Conversation), even though he was flatteringly assured that the editor was a great admirer of his own long defunct journals and intended to carry on in their spirit. But the pressure of labor on his novel did not prevent him from regularly attending the dinners offered every Wednesday evening by Prince Meshchersky; and he began to lead once again something closer to a normal social life. The husband of his niece, Professor M. S. Vladislavlev, who had once been a contributor to Dostoevsky’s journals, now taught philosophy at the University of St. Petersburg, and he frequently invited his eminent uncle-in-law to meet some of the luminaries of the learned world. He also began to entertain, and for a party on February 17, the day assigned in the Russian calendar to Saint Feodor Tiron (hence Dostoevsky’s name day, which Russians celebrate as a birthday), he sent invitations to close friends. Learning that Nikolay G. Danilevsky, the author of Russia and Europe, was then passing through Petersburg, he asked Strakhov, whom he assumed could locate him, to bring Danilevsky along. They had known each other in the faraway days of the Petrashevsky circle during the 1840s, when Danilevsky had earned the reputation of being the most thorough connoisseur of the Utopian Socialist doctrines of Charles Fourier. Since then, he had become a naturalist as well as a speculative historian of culture and had developed a theory of world civilization with a strong Slavophil tendency. Although not agreeing with Danilevsky in every respect, Dostoevsky greatly admired his efforts to prove that Russian culture would soon create a new, independent phase of world history; and he employed some of these ideas for the impassionedly nationalistic speeches of Shatov in The Devils.

Parts I and II of this novel had been published by the end of 1871, and the first reactions to these sections of the book were beginning to appear. Dostoevsky, who had initially thought of the work as a pamphlet, had anticipated that it would be met with fierce hostility by the radical critics who had already attacked Crime and Punishment as a slander on the young student generation. And although the novel eventually became what Dostoevsky called a poem rather than a pamphlet—the political Nechaev theme being interwoven with Stavrogin’s tragic efforts to erase from his heart the distinction between good and evil—enough aspects of the pamphlet remained to make the book anathema to those who, without necessarily approving of Nechaev’s methods, sympathized with his revolutionary aims. A typical early review, printed in the Birzhevie Vedomosti (Stock Exchange News), denounced Dostoevsky’s lurid portrayal of the radicals as having "surpassed all of the rivals who had embarked on this road in the Russian Messenger and other journals of the same ilk which we have already forgotten. In one of the most often quoted passage in the book, a radical theoretician named Shigalev explains that, while he had begun his reflections with the idea of total freedom, he had discovered, to his dismay, that he had ended with that of total despotism. And he insists that the only logical answer to the social problem is to reduce all but one-tenth of humanity to the level of an organic, physiological equality like a herd of cattle. The critic compares such notions to the madness of Poprischin in Gogol’s Memoirs of a Madman. The novel, in his view, evokes a hospital filled with mental patients supposedly making up . . . a gathering of contemporary people."¹⁵ One of the commonest charges that continued to be leveled against Dostoevsky was that his characters were too mentally pathological to be taken as serious social commentary. An implicit subtext of such criticism was that the author himself, known to be epileptic, suffered from the same abnormality that filled his pages.

Dostoevsky’s immediate entourage, of course, took quite a different view of his new novel, and nothing could have given him more pleasure than a letter he received from Strakhov in April 1871, just before leaving Europe for his return. It is obvious, wrote the critic, whose literary acumen Dostoevsky valued very highly, that as regards substance, as regards the quantity and variety of ideas, you are first among us, and even Tolstoy compared to you is more monotonous. Such praise from a great admirer of Tolstoy, with whose achievements he now saw himself to be in competition, could not have been more welcome; but Strakhov then goes on to complain, as he had done in the past, that Dostoevsky packed too much into his novels and thus confused the average reader.¹⁶ Modestly responding that Strakhov ranks him too highly in placing him above Tolstoy, he admits the imputed fault of superabundance: Many separate novels and stories squeeze themselves suddenly into one for me, he explains, so that there is neither measure nor harmony. But while conceding a tendency to be carried away by poetic inspiration and thus to undertak[e] to express an artistic idea beyond my capacities, he nonetheless clearly does not underestimate his own artistic stature. In the very next sentence he notes that Victor Hugo and even Pushkin suffered from somewhat the same disability.¹⁷

Even though quite prepared to bear the brunt of the antagonism that he knew The Devils would encounter, Dostoevsky must certainly have been consoled by the testimonies he was receiving that his novels had already assured him a secure place in Russian literature. One such came in a letter from Princess V. D. Obolenskaya, the literary daughter of an important government official and a contributor to various periodicals specializing in the Russian historical past. As she informed the author, Crime and Punishment was for her the finest work in Russian literature, and it had become her cherished dream to turn it into a play for the Imperial Theatre. Dostoevsky gave her the permission she requested because he had taken it as a rule never to hinder such attempts; but he was not sure that such an adaptation from one form to another was feasible, or at least he knew that it posed considerable difficulties.¹⁸

His reflections on this problem are of the greatest interest because of the numerous attempts that have been made to turn his novels into plays and, more recently, into films. There is some secret of art, he continues, on the basis of which the epic form can never find a correspondence for itself in the dramatic form. I believe that for various forms of art there exists a series of poetic ideas corresponding to them as well, so that a certain idea can never be expressed in another form, one that does not correspond to it. Despite the well-known dramatic quality of his novels and stories, which rely more on scenic encounters and dialogic exchanges than on description or exposition, Dostoevsky thus did not assume that it would be a relatively simple matter to turn them into plays. On the contrary, he was willing to envisage, and even to approve, the dramatist taking the greatest liberties with the original text. After remarking that previous attempts of this kind had turned out rather badly, he goes on: It will be another matter if you redo the novel as much as possible and change it, saving from it just one episode or another, for reworking into a play, or, taking the original idea, will you completely alter the plot?¹⁹

Another welcome evidence of Dostoevsky’s stature came in a letter from Pavel M. Tretyakov, the owner of an important art gallery in Moscow, who had commissioned the celebrated artist V. G. Perov to furnish his collection with portraits of the most eminent living figures in Russian culture. He accepted the honor of sitting for Perov with a great deal of satisfaction,