Dostoevsky (130 page)

Dostoevsky had promised Katkov—in return for the resumption of his monthly stipend—that he would furnish the beginning of a new novel not later than June 1870. This commitment, however, was based on the rash assumption that he could dash off his pamphlet in just a few months. But the increasing complexity of his plans made this promise impossible to keep, and at the beginning of July Dostoevsky told his niece that he hoped to meet a new deadline at the end of August or early September. Five months later, he described to Strakhov some of the difficulties he had experienced even in the very early stages of composition: “All year I only tore up and made alterations. I blackened so many mounds of paper that I even lost my system of references for what I had written. I have modified the plan not less than ten times, and completely rewrote the first part each time.”
¹²

Short of funds as usual, and unable to obtain any further advances from Katkov before providing some manuscript, Dostoevsky had turned to
Dawn
for aid. But after receiving nine hundred rubles, nothing had appeared under his signature when
Dawn
ceased publication in 1873. During the month of July, suffering from weekly epileptic attacks, Dostoevsky found it impossible to write at all,
¹³
but this imposed respite gave him the opportunity, when he returned to his desk in August, to look afresh at what he had already written. He told Katkov a month later that “of the fifteen signatures already written [in the first version—J.F.], probably twelve will go into the new version of the novel.”
¹⁴
He could now promise his text to Katkov, and enough copy was supplied to the journal in the next five months to ensure the beginning of publication in January 1871.

One of the most important events in the novel, he tells his editor, will be “the well-known murder of Ivanov in Moscow by Nechaev,” though he hastens to add, “my Peter Verkhovensky may not at all resemble Nechaev; but it seems to me that my aroused mind has created by imagination the person, the type, that
really corresponds to the crime. . . . To my own surprise, this figure half turns out with me to be a comic figure.” As a result, Dostoevsky continues, “even though the whole incident [the murder] forms one of the main events of the novel, it is nonetheless only accessory and a setting for the actions of another character, who could really be called the main character. . . . This other character (Nikolay Stavrogin)—is also a sinister character, also a villain. But he seems to me a tragic character. . . . I embarked on the poem about this character because for much too long I have wished to portray him. In my opinion he is Russian, and a typical character.” At the same time, to balance these “somber figures,” there will also be “radiant ones. . . . As the ideal of such a character I take Tikhon Zadonsky. . . . I confront the hero of my novel with him.”
¹⁵

What happened in August, then, was the recognition by Dostoevsky of what we have seen taking place in his notebooks during April and May: the transformation of the Prince into Stavrogin, whom he found more and more difficult, as he wrote, to fit into the framework originally established. As Stavrogin increased in stature, complexity, and tragic significance, he began to duplicate some of the lineaments of Nechaev as a “hero of our time” and an irresistibly attractive and powerful satanic figure. It was thus necessary to recreate Peter Verkhovensky as partly comic, and in some notes from mid-August, under the title “Something New,” we find among other items: “And Nechaev’s appearance on the scene as Khlestakov” (11: 202). No longer Bazarov or Pechorin, Nechaev (Peter Verkhovensky) is here reimagined as the ingratiating, fast-talking, and deceptive impostor in Gogol’s
Inspector-General
, who now, like everyone else, revolves around Stavrogin and becomes an insidiously dangerous and semicomic rogue. Once this change had been made, the structural problem that had been plaguing Dostoevsky solved itself.

Dostoevsky’s erstwhile political novel had now become
Demons
, a “tragic poem” about the moral-spiritual ills that had been afflicting Russian culture and had climaxed in the appearance of Nechaev and his accomplices. Writing to Maikov the day after he sent off his first chapters, Dostoevsky explains how he saw the book he was just setting out to write (or rewrite): “It is true that the facts have also proved to us that the disease that afflicted cultured Russians was much more virulent than we ourselves had imagined, and that it did not end with the Belinskys and the Kraevskys and their ilk. But at that moment what happened is attested to by Saint Luke: the devils had entered into a man and their name was legion, and they asked Him: ‘suffer us to enter into the swine,’ and He suffered them. The devils entered into the swine, and the whole herd ran violently down a steep place to the sea and was drowned. When the people came out to see what was done, they found the man who had been possessed now sitting at
the feet of Jesus clothed and in his right mind, and those who saw it told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils was healed.”
¹⁶

Dostoevsky dearly wished to believe that Russia too would be healed in the same way: but he knew that such hopes remained as yet only a remote possibility, visible, if at all, solely to the farseeing eyes of prophets like Maikov and himself. What he saw all around, and what he would depict in his novel, was the process of infection and self-destruction rather than the end result of purification. “Exactly the same thing,” his letter continues, “happened in our country: the devils went out of the Russian man and entered into a herd of swine, that is, into the Nechaevs and Serno-Solovieviches, et al. These are drowned or will be drowned, and the healed man, from whom the devils have departed, sits at the feet of Jesus. . . . and bear this in mind, my dear friend, that a man who loses his people and his national roots also loses the faith of his fathers and his God. Well, if you really want to know—this is in essence the theme of my novel. It is called
Demons
and it describes how the devils entered into the herd of swine.”
¹⁷
This self-interpretation is usually taken only as a loosely allegorical explanation of why Dostoevsky chose the passage from Luke as one of his epigraphs; but in my opinion the explanation is meant more literally, and furnishes a valuable interpretative clue to the manner in which Stavrogin is related to the other characters and to the ideological construction of the book. Just in what way, however, will be left to a later chapter.

More and more Dostoevsky felt it imperative to return to Russia, and not only for the sake of his writing. In January 1871, Dostoevsky informed his niece Sofya Ivanova, “Anna Grigoryevna has even fallen ill from missing Russia, and that torments me. . . . True, she is very exhausted physically from nursing the baby a whole year. . . . The doctors said that she has symptoms of severe exhaustion of the blood, and specifically from nursing. . . . She’s been walking little, mostly sitting or lying down. I am terribly afraid.”
¹⁸
Anna had become so depressed that she even refused to take the iron prescribed to her by the doctors, and Dostoevsky attributed much of her despondency to the melancholy of exile: “there’s no way her inner longing, her homesickness can be chased away.”

The couple thus decided to return to Russia whenever they could scrape together enough to meet the expenses of the trip; the fear of prison now took second place to their irrepressible need to regain their native soil. An advertisement had apprised him that a new edition of
Crime and Punishment
was to be published by Stellovsky, and Dostoevsky asked Maikov to collect the three thousand
rubles the publisher was required by contract to pay the author. All of Dostoevsky’s financial tribulations momentarily seemed at an end; this windfall would be enough to ensure a secure return. But Stellovsky, engaging in his usual delaying tactics, pleaded a poverty that Dostoevsky knew was fictitious, and even the threat of being forced to pay damages for breach of contract could not bring the wily businessman to heel. Dostoevsky was unable to obtain a single ruble when he needed it most, and it would take five years to extract his fee from Stellovsky.

Dresden harbored a large Russian colony that included some admirers of their resident author, a celebrity of sorts even if his convict past made him rather suspect. But Dostoevsky tolerated any renewal of social life solely in the hope of alleviating Anna’s crippling depression. As Anna later remarked, “our Russian friends in Dresden were in his opinion not Russians but voluntary émigrés, who did not love Russia and had left it forever.”
¹⁹
All the same, he was happy to lend these Russians his literary services when they appealed to him in a patriotic cause. In October 1870 the Russian government announced that it was unilaterally abrogating one of the clauses of the Treaty of Paris, which had been signed after its humiliating defeat in the Crimean War. No longer would the Russian government accept the prohibition against stationing its fleet in the Black Sea. On this occasion the Russians in Dresden sent a message of support to the Russian chancellor, and when Dostoevsky was asked to write it, he gladly complied.

The defiant action of the Russian government was one of the consequences of the quick defeat of France by Prussia, allied with the south German states, in the Franco-Prussian War. Dostoevsky’s sympathies were unmistakably with the French, and he followed the campaign closely as it unfolded. He believed the Germans would win eventually, but that defeat would help to bring about a rejuvenation even of France itself. “France has grown too callous and petty. Temporary pain is of no importance; it will endure it and rise again to a new life and a new idea.”
²⁰
Presumably, the war would lead to a replacement of materialistic tendencies by more exalted values.

Like many others in France and Europe, Dostoevsky had been horrified at the uprising of the Commune and the destruction of the city that ensued (partly as the result of the desperate defense of the Communards, in whose ranks could be found Dostoevsky’s erstwhile beloved Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya). Writing to Strakhov, who had objected to his scatological insults against Belinsky as “the mangy Russian liberalism preached by shitheads like the dung beetle Belinsky and the like,” Dostoevsky replied by linking the critic—and thus the theme of his novel—directly to the cataclysmic events taking place in the French capital.
“But take a look at Paris, at the Commune,” he admonishes. “Can you really also be one of those who say that it again failed for lack of people, circumstances, and so on? For the whole nineteenth century that movement has . . . been dreaming of paradise on earth (beginning with the phalanstery). . . . In essence it is all the same old Rousseau and the dream of re-creating the world anew through reason and knowledge . . . (positivism). . . . The burning of Paris is a monstrosity: ‘It did not succeed, so let the world perish because the Commune is higher than the happiness of the world and of France.’ . . . to them (and many others) this monstrosity doesn’t seem madness but, on the contrary,
beauty
. The aesthetic idea of modern humanity has become obscured.”
²¹
True beauty for Dostoevsky had been incarnated in the world by Christ, and to equate it with violent destruction was the worst of abominations.

Dostoevsky, as we see, remained impenitent toward Belinsky, though he tries momentarily to separate the man from his ideas. “I criticized Belinsky,” he explains, “more as a phenomenon of Russian life than as a person: that was the most foul-smelling, obtuse, and ignominious phenomenon of Russian life.” He returns to the charge when he places Belinsky and his generation in exactly the same perspective as the one used for Stepan Trofimovich in his novel. “If Belinsky, Granovsky, and that whole bunch of scum were to take a look now, they would say: ‘No, that is not what we were dreaming of, that is a deviation; let us wait a bit, and light will appear, progress will ascend to the throne, and humanity will be remade on sound principles and will be happy!’ There is no way they could agree that once you have set off down that road, there is no place you can arrive at other than the Commune.” Indeed, Dostoevsky even imagines Belinsky arguing that the “Commune was a failure because it was French,” and that Russia could do it better because it had
no
nationality at all to impede the building of a brave new world.
²²
Such bitter words indicate the unappeasable fury of Dostoevsky’s indignation, and his anger leads him to deprecate Belinsky’s literary judgments, once valued so highly, in ways that manifestly exaggerate their presumed wrongheadedness and dogmatism.

What Dostoevsky could never forgive was Belinsky’s animadversions against Christ during their conversations in 1845. “But here is something more; you never knew him,” he writes Strakhov vehemently; “but I knew him and saw him and now fully comprehend him. That man reviled Christ to me in the foulest language, but meanwhile he himself was never capable of setting all the movers and shakers of the whole world side-by-side with Christ by way of comparison. He was not able to notice how much petty vanity, spite, intolerance, irritability, vileness, and, most important, vanity, there was in him and in them. In reviling
Christ he never asked himself what we would set up in place of him—surely not ourselves, when we are so vile. No, he never pondered the fact that he himself was so vile. He was extremely satisfied with himself, and that was personal, foul-smelling, ignominious obtuseness.”
²³
Belinsky, to do him justice, could often be harshly self-critical and self-condemnatory, but Dostoevsky’s recollection of the insults to Christ, combined with their now-evident (to him) Nechaevist consequences, now drove the novelist beyond all bounds.