Dostoevsky (128 page)

In mid-December 1869 Dostoevsky speaks of his obligation to
The Russian Messenger
with anxiety and indicates how he will proceed. He is engaged on a vast novel, he tells his niece, “only the first part of which will be published in
The Russian Messenger
. It will not be finished sooner than in five years, and will be divided into three separate novellas. This novel is the whole hope and whole dream of my life—not only as regards money.”
¹⁹
Dostoevsky, not surprisingly, voices all his qualms about taking such a decision. “In order to write this novel—I would need to be in Russia,” he insists. “For instance, the second half of my
first novel takes place in a monastery. I need not just see it (I have seen a lot) but to live in a monastery for a while too.”
²⁰

The bulk of Dostoevsky’s notes deal with the childhood and boyhood of the “great sinner,” who is a member of an “accidental family”—as Dostoevsky liked to call households with no settled traditions of order or decorum. The central figure here is an illegitimate child, sent to live with an elderly couple in the countryside and raised in isolation from his father (a situation that will later be used for
A Raw Youth
). Dostoevsky’s rivalry with Tolstoy is apparent in the definition he sets down of what he wishes his character to represent. “A type entirely contrary to the scion of that noble family of counts, degenerate to the point of swinishness, which Tolstoy had depicted in
Childhood and Boyhood
. This [Dostoevsky’s new type] is simply a primitive type, subconsciously agitated by a primitive strength, a strength which is completely spontaneous” (9: 128).

The great sinner was to possess such an elemental force, symbolic of that contained in the Russian people, “an extraordinary inner power hard to bear for those who possess it, a power which demands peace out of the storms of life to the point of suffering, yet cannot help stirring up storms before it finds peace. He finally comes to rest in Christ, but his whole life is storm and disorder.” Such a type “joyfully throws itself—in its period of searches and wanderings—into monstrous deviations and experiments until it comes to rest on an idea powerful enough to be fully proportionate to its own immediate primitive strength—an idea so powerful that it can at last organize this strength and calm it down to a tranquilizing stillness” (9: 128).

The great sinner is sent off to a monastery as a means of disciplining his rebellious behavior, portrayed through incidents such as the desecration of an icon. There he encounters a saintly monk named Tikhon. The character of Tikhon would be based on the figure of Saint Tikhon-Zadonsky, a Russian clergyman of the mid-eighteenth century who was elevated to sainthood in 1860 and left an abundant literary legacy (fifteen volumes). In the spring of 1870 Dostoevsky had told Maikov that “I took [him] into my heart with rapture a long time ago,”
²¹
perhaps when an edition of Tikhon’s works was published at the time of his canonization. Father George Florovsky, the greatest modern historian of Russian theology, speaks of Saint Tikhon as undergoing what Saint John of the Cross called
la noche oscura
, the “dark night of the soul,”
²²
and Dostoevsky would have been deeply moved by Saint Tikhon’s open expression of moods of depression, despair, and susceptibility to temptation. Dostoevsky also found in his writings many of the moral-religious precepts that formed the basis of his own conception of Russian Orthodoxy.

Evil, according to Saint Tikhon, was necessary to the world to bring about the birth of the good, and the chief Christian task of mankind was to conquer its own evil proclivities, to conquer “pride by humility, anger by gentleness and patience, hatred by love.”
²³
It is only through the experience of wrestling with the evil in itself that humankind discovers the value and meaning of human existence. Surely such ideas are the source of the famous notebook entry in which Dostoevsky defined what was for him “the Orthodox point of view” dominant in his work: “man is not born for happiness . . . because the knowledge of life and consciousness . . . is acquired by experience
pro and contra
, which one must take upon oneself. (By suffering, such is the law of our planet)” (7: 155).

For Tikhon, indeed, even crime was a way of clearing the path to such a discovery of Christian truth; in principle, the possibility of enlightenment and purification was never closed, no matter how burdensome the crime weighing down a human consciousness. “There is no kind of sin,” he declared, “and there cannot be any such on earth, that God would not pardon to someone who sincerely repents.” There are many references in Tikhon’s works to “a great sinner,” and he insists that, whatever the multitude and magnitude of sins, God would always pardon a remorseful heart. One of the best-known incidents of Saint Tikhon’s life involved a quarrel with a landowner reputed to be a “Voltarian.” Disputing about questions of faith with Tikhon, the irascible landowner flared up and struck the clergyman in the face. Although known for his fiery temper, Tikhon immediately kneeled and begged forgiveness for having provoked the blow. Such an incident would certainly have been taken by Dostoevsky as an early symbolic instance of that clash between the disintegrating effects of Western reason and the kenotic Russian faith that had now become the great theme of his life.

During his stay in the monastery, and under the tutelage of Tikhon, the egoism of the great sinner turns inward on itself. He is still obsessed by a need for power and domination; but he begins to believe that this need can be satisfied only by first conquering himself. Under the notebook entry titled “The Principal Idea” we read: “After the monastery and Tikhon the great sinner again goes into the world to be the
greatest of men
 . . . he is the proudest of the proud and treats people with the greatest arrogance. . . . But (and this is the essential) thanks to Tikhon he had been seized by the idea (conviction): that to conquer the entire world it suffices to conquer oneself” (9: 138–139).

Self-conquest is thus the highest expression of the freedom of the will, the most exalted goal of the most powerful personality. The subsequent career of the great sinner is rapidly sketched: “Suddenly adolescence and debauchery. . . . 
Insensate pride. Out of pride he becomes ascetic and pilgrim. . . . [H]e shows himself as gentle and humble toward all—precisely because he is infinitely higher than all” (9: 138). As with all the notes he made for future works, Dostoevsky is much concerned with narrative technique and form. The “tone” of his narrative was to be that of a
vita
, the hagiographic life of a saint. “N.B.
Tone
(the narrative is a
vita
, i.e., even though it comes from the author’s pen, . . . The reader still ought to know at all times that the whole idea is a pious one.” “The man of the future,” he adds, “is to be exhibited for everyone to see, and to be placed on a pedestal” (9: 132–133). Dostoevsky would later return to these notes for both
A Raw Youth
(where the peasant “wanderer” Makar also regales an adolescent with edifying parables and apothegms) and
The Brothers Karamazov
, where Zosima’s life is narrated as a
vita
and the semi-hagiographic treatment of the “man of the future” would be realized in Alyosha.

Dostoevsky did not, so far as we know, settle down to the redaction of the novel sketched in these notes. Instead, as he told Maikov just a month later, he was swept away by a new inspiration that changed all his plans. “I have tackled a rich idea,” he informs his friend enthusiastically. “I am not speaking of the execution, but the idea. One of the ideas that has an undoubted resonance among the public. Like
Crime and Punishment
, but even closer to reality, more vital, and having direct relevance for the most important contemporary issue. I will finish by fall; I’m not hurrying and not rushing.”
²⁴
These words are the first reference to
Demons
, which was indeed conceived in relation to the recent discovery of a murder committed by a group of revolutionary conspirators. Dostoevsky thus sets aside his “eternal” theme, that of atheism, for one that was burningly topical because he was persuaded that such a book would solve all his problems. He would pillory the radicals once and for all, satisfy
The Russian Messenger
with a novel, reap a rich financial reward, and do all this in record time. “I hope to make at least as much money as for
Crime and Punishment
, and therefore, by the end of the year there is hope of putting all my affairs in order and of returning to Russia. . . . Never have I worked with such enjoyment and such ease.”
²⁵

Work on the new novel began immediately and relegated
The Life of a Great Sinner
, which Dostoevsky must have given up with some relief, to a less uncertain, less economically harassed, and happily repatriated future. But his imagination could not relinquish the stately vistas it had created, and he continued to toil at their elaboration. In late March, Dostoevsky speaks of five novels to Maikov, instead of three (the size of
War and Peace
, he remarks, again disclosing the
competition with Tolstoy), and defines his “main question” as being “the same one that I have been tormented by consciously and unconsciously all my life—the existence of God.” He also confesses how painfully he suffers from a sense of inferiority to his two great rivals, Turgenev and Tolstoy, and his hope of enhancing his status by the exalted thematic heights he would be attempting to scale. “Perhaps people will at last say,” he complains sadly, “that I did not spend all my time writing trifles.”
²⁶

More than anything else, however, and with Saint Tikhon as model, Dostoevsky wished to produce “a majestic,
positive
, holy figure.”
²⁷
His great ambition was now to provide Russian culture with an august image expressing its highest religious values. The disappointing reception of his first attempt,
The Idiot
, had not quenched his aspiration, and the historical stature of Saint Tikhon would shield his literary eulogist from the all-too-familiar accusation of giving rein to his weakness for “the fantastic.” “I will not be creating anything,” he assures Maikov, “I will just portray the real Tikhon.” Side by side with Saint Tikhon would stand the type of character Dostoevsky had been struggling to delineate ever since the epilogue to
Crime and Punishment
—a great sinner, who would convincingly undergo a religious conversion and display the regenerative effects of Saint Tikhon’s teaching and example.

Dostoevsky intended to keep his “contemporary” theme separate from his more “exalted” one of atheism, postponing the second for more propitious working conditions while quickly (and profitably) dispatching the first. In doing so, however, he was allowing his contest with Tolstoy, whose elevation of subject matter he envied and wished to emulate, to tempt him into running counter to the distinctive idiosyncrasy of his talent. Dostoevsky always found his inspiration in the most immediate and sensational events of the day—events that were often commonplace and even sordid—and then raised such material in his best work to the level of the genuinely tragic. This union of the contemporary and the tragic was the true secret of his genius, and he finally found it impossible to maintain the forced and artificial disjunction of one from the other that he thought he could impose. The great work that he called his “poem” could not be kept distinct from the social-political “pamphlet” into which he had thrown himself, and the two eventually blended together into his unprecedented novel-tragedy,
Demons
.

¹
PSS
, 29/Bk. 1: 58n.1; August 29/September 10, 1869.

²
Ibid., 123; May 7/19, 1870.

³
Ibid., 32; March 18/30, 1869.

⁴
Ibid.

⁵
Ibid.

⁶
Ibid., 43; May 15/27, 1869.

⁷
Ibid., 56–57; August 29/September 10, 1869.