Dostoevsky (10 page)

Perhaps this aspect of Scott struck him so forcibly because it helped him accept his own familial situation with more equanimity. The budding consciousness of the youthful Dostoevsky may have vibrated to Scott’s glorification of patriarchal relations between ruler and ruled as the surest anchor of social stability. If so, this is exactly the relation between the tsar-father and his “children”—his subjects—that Dostoevsky will later convince himself existed in Russia, and which served as a bulwark, in his view, against the disintegrating individualism of European society. He came to believe that the protection of this “feeling” was a necessary “condition for the preservation of mankind.” And if
The Brothers Karamazov
, after
King Lear
, is the greatest work ever written to illustrate the moral horrors that ensue when family bonds disintegrate, it is partly because Dostoevsky had been mulling over this theme all his life.

Dr. Dostoevsky was a subscriber to the new periodical,
The Library for Reading
(
Biblioteka dlya chteniya
), and it was probably in these pages that Dostoevsky first became aware of such writers as Victor Hugo, Balzac, and George Sand, who were soon to play so important a part in his spiritual and literary evolution. At the same time, Dostoevsky was also receiving his first important exposure to German Idealist and Romantic ideas in the classroom. His professor of literature during his senior year was I. I. Davydov, one of the small group of academics responsible for propagating Schelling’s ideas in Russia. He thoroughly indoctrinated Dostoevsky with the whole tradition of German Romantic Idealist art and aesthetics that dominated Russian culture in the 1830s.

What affected Dostoevsky most profoundly was Schelling’s view of art as an organ of metaphysical cognition—indeed, as
the
vehicle through which the mysteries of the highest transcendental truths are revealed to mankind. The entire generation of the 1840s became imbued with this belief in the exalted metaphysical mission of art; and no one was to defend it with more passion and brilliance than Dostoevsky. As we shall see, Dostoevsky was also influenced by Schelling’s view that the highest truths were closed to discursive reason but accessible by a superior faculty of “intellectual intuition,” as well as by his Idealist conception of nature as dynamic rather than static and mechanical—or, in other words, as exhibiting a spiritual meaning and purpose. Such ideas must have seemed to the young Dostoevsky a welcome confirmation, offered by the most up-to-date science and philosophy, of the religious convictions he had been taught as a child and had always accepted.

Of even greater importance for Dostoevsky than all the influences we have mentioned so far, however, was that of Alexander Pushkin. Some of Pushkin’s prose was read in the family circle, but his reputation was as yet by no means established, and the juvenile enthusiasm of both Mikhail and Feodor for his work
gives evidence of their serious literary propensities. Some of Pushkin’s greatest works appeared during Dostoevsky’s adolescence (“The Queen of Spades,” “Songs of the Western Slavs,” “The Covetous Knight,” “The Bronze Horseman,” “Egyptian Nights”), and, though greeted tepidly by the critics they were avidly read by the young Feodor.

On hearing of Pushkin’s death in February 1837, Dostoevsky told the family that, if he were not already wearing mourning for his mother, he would have wished to do so for Pushkin. There is something impulsively right in this youthful desire; if it was his mother who had given birth to him in the flesh, it was Pushkin who had given birth to him in the world of the spirit. Pushkin dominates Dostoevsky’s literary life from beginning to end, and the great writer of his youth is also the one to whom he devoted his last public utterance. In the famous speech he gave at the dedication of a Pushkin monument in 1880—a speech that caused a national sensation—Dostoevsky interpreted Pushkin’s writing as the first (and still unsurpassed) utterance of Russia’s deepest moral-national values. Pushkin’s work provides the foundations and defines the horizon of Dostoevsky’s own creative universe.

Dostoevsky read and reread Pushkin, meditated unceasingly on his works, and bequeathed to posterity a series of inspired interpretations of them that have permanently affected Russian criticism. Even more, Dostoevsky’s own writings are impossible to imagine without taking Pushkin into account as a predecessor. Leonid Grossman has well said that “His greatest figures are linked to Pushkin’s heroes, and often are manifestly deepenings of the original Pushkinian sketches that lift them to the level of tragic intensity.”
³¹
The terrified clerks of the early stories could not have existed without “The Bronze Horseman” and “The Station Master”; Raskolnikov recreates the murderous folly of Pushkin’s Hermann in “The Queen of Spades,” who is equally obsessed with an
idée fixe
and equally ready to murder to obtain wealth and power; Stavrogin transforms the charming ne’er-do-well Evgeny Onegin into a terrifying demonic force. The theme of impostorship—so brilliantly dramatized in
Boris Godunov
, and so fateful and omnipresent in Russian history—also haunts Dostoevsky’s pages from first to last, beginning with
The Double
, taken up again in
Demons
, and culminating majestically in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.

D. V. Grigorovich, who later became a novelist, was a fellow student with Dostoevsky at the Academy of Military Engineers. He remembers being impressed not only by Dostoevsky’s thorough knowledge of Pushkin’s works but also by the fact that only he, among all the other students, took Pushkin’s death to heart. It is clear that Dostoevsky was living emotionally in a world quite different
from that inhabited by most of his comrades, whose heads were filled with more immediately practical concerns. At the age of sixteen, it is the disastrous fate of his literary idol, as well as all that Pushkin’s untimely death implied for Russian culture, that involves Dostoevsky’s deepest feelings. And if we are to understand him properly, we should keep in mind this precocious capacity to pour the full intensity of his private emotions into what was, essentially, a matter of cultural and national concern.

¹
Alexander Herzen,
My Past and Thoughts
, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgens, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 1: 42.

²
Ibid., 2: 412.

³
Ibid., 1: 42.

⁴
DW
(1873, no. 50), 152.

⁵
Miller,
Biografiya
, 5–6.

⁶
DVS
, 1: 75.

⁷
Ibid.

⁸
A. P. Stanley,
Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church
(London, 1924), 303.

⁹
DW
(1873, no. 50), 152.

¹⁰
Théophile Gautier,
Voyage en Russie
(Paris, n.d.), 276.

¹¹
Stanley,
Lectures
, 279.

¹²
Ibid., 319.

¹³
A. M. Dostoevsky,
Vospominaniya
(Leningrad, 1930), 48–49.

¹⁴
DW
(July–August 1877), 803.

¹⁵
See George P. Fedotov,
The Russian Religious Mind
(New York, 1960), chap. 4.

¹⁶
A. Leroy-Beaulieu,
The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians
, 3 vols. (New York, 1902), 3: 48.

¹⁷
DVS
, 1: 42–43.

¹⁸
DW
(April 1876), 284–285.

¹⁹
DVS
, 1: 61.

²⁰
Ibid.

²¹
V. S. Nechaeva,
V seme i usadbe Dostoevskikh
(Moscow, 1939), 117–118; February 2, 1838.

²²
Ibid., 73; June 29, 1832.

²³
Ibid., 107; June 2, 1835.

²⁴
Pisma
, 3: 177; June 10/22, 1875.

²⁵
In this interview, Kant also expounds on that human striving toward an ideal that Dostoevsky would vigorously uphold against the determinist and materialist tendency of his time: “Activity is man’s lot, He can never be completely content with that which he has, but is always striving to obtain something more. Death surprises us on the road toward something we still desire. Give a man everything he desires and yet at that very moment he will feel that this
everything
is not
everything
. Failing to see the aim or purpose of our striving in this life, we assume there is a future where the knot must be untied.” N. M. Karamzin,
Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–1790
, trans. and abridged by Florence Jonas (New York, 1957), 40–41.

²⁶
Marc Raeff,
Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia
(New York, 1966), 142.

²⁷
Pis’ma
, 4: 196; August 18, 1880.

²⁸
For a useful summary of the material, see Edmund K. Kostka,
Schiller in Russian Literature
(Philadelphia, 1965); chap. 7 is devoted to Dostoevsky. See also D. Chizhevsky, “Schiller v Rossii,”
Novy Zhurnal
45 (1956), 109–135, and the spirited study by the Soviet Germanist N. Vilmont, “Dostoevsky i Schiller,” in his
Velikie sputniki
(Moscow, 1966), 7–316.

²⁹
DW
(June 1876), 343.

³⁰
Pis’ma
, 4: 196; August 18, 1880.

³¹
Leonid Grossman,
Biblioteka Dostoevskogo
(Odessa, 1919), 70; for more details, see A. L. Bem,
U istokov tvorchestva Dostoevskogo
(Prague, 1936), 37–123. Another good treatment is D. D. Blagoy, “Dostoevsky i Pushkin,” in
Dostoevsky—khudoznik i myslitel
’ (Moscow, 1972), 344–426.

The death of Marya Feodorovna snapped the strongest emotional thread tying the young Dostoevsky to Moscow; but the inner conflict between his desire to leave and the bleakness of the prospect ahead may account for the mysterious illness that struck him down just before his departure for the Academy of Military Engineers. Without any apparent cause, he lost his voice and seemed to have contracted some throat or chest ailment whose diagnosis was uncertain. The impending trip to St. Petersburg had to be postponed until finally Dr. Dostoevsky was advised to begin the journey and trust to the revivifying effects of travel. Andrey remarks that his brother’s voice, after that time, always retained a curious throaty quality that never appeared quite normal.

The advice was sound, and Feodor’s illness passed away once the gates of Moscow were left behind. And no wonder! What Russian youth would not have felt a surge of strength and excitement at the prospect of going to St. Petersburg for the first time? For all young Russians, the journey was from past to present, from the city of monasteries and religious processions to that of severe government buildings and monstrous military parades, the journey to the spot where Peter the Great had broken “a window through to Europe.” It was also, for Mikhail and Feodor, the journey from boyhood to manhood, the end of the protected family world they had known and the beginning of the insecurities of independence.

Years later, Dostoevsky wrote of this journey in
The Diary of a Writer
, evoking the state of mind in which both boys approached this new era in their lives. The brothers had their heads stuffed full of the mathematics that were necessary for their entrance examination into the academy, but both were secretly harboring literary ambitions. “We dreamt only of poetry and poets. My brother wrote verses, at least three poems a day even on the road, and I spent all my time composing in my head a novel of Venetian life.”
¹
The two young men planned immediately to visit the site of the duel in which Pushkin had been killed four months earlier and then “to see the room in which his soul expired.”
²
Both were
possessed by a mood of vague yearning and expectancy to which the mature Dostoevsky gives both a moral and a cultural significance. “My brother and I were then longing for a new life, we dreamt about something enormous, about everything ‘beautiful and sublime’; such touching words were then still fresh, and uttered without irony.”
³