Dostoevsky (137 page)

Just as Stepan Trofimovich returns home in a shambles after his attempt to make a comeback in Petersburg in the early 1860s, having been discarded by the new breed of radicals as “
un vieux bonnet de coton
,” so Herzen is dismissed by Chernyshevsky as similar to “the fine skeleton of a mammal . . . that had been dug up and belonged to a different world with a different sun and different trees.” But Herzen, refusing to be swept so easily into the dustbin of history, stubbornly rejects an obligation to say farewell, in the name of utility and revolution, to the significance of his own past and that of humankind as a whole. For if the blinkered view of the 1860s is accepted, then, as Herzen says in eloquent words that Stepan Trofimovich will echo, “farewell not only to Thermopylae and Golgotha, but also to Sophocles and Shakespeare, and incidentally to the whole long and endless epic poem which is continually ending in frenzied tragedies and continually going on again under the title of history.”
¹⁸

Despite disagreements over tactics, particularly after Karakozov’s attempt to assassinate Alexander II, which Herzen reproved in
The Bell
, Herzen insisted that the goals of the indigenous Russian radical movement, which looked to Chernyshevsky as its leader, did not differ from the ones he had advocated in exile, and he urged that the two generations should go forward hand in hand. This plea for unity only provoked a furious reply from one of the leaders of the “young emigration,” Alexander Serno-Solovievich, who dismissed Herzen even more unceremoniously than Chernyshevsky had done. In words that remarkably anticipate Dostoevsky’s, he proclaimed that Herzen was just another
vieux bonnet de coton
, exactly like Stepan Trofimovich:

Herzen did not reply directly to this scurrilously abusive broadside. Instead, he sent the brochure, along with a letter, to Bakunin, whose indiscriminate sympathy with the younger generation would later lead to his association with
Nechaev. Serno-Solovievich, in Herzen’s view, “is insolent and a fool; but the worst is that the majority of the young Russians
are the same
and we’re the ones who have contributed to make them
like this
. . . . This isn’t Nihilism. Nihilism is a great phenomenon in the evolution of Russian thought. No. These are the dispossessed noblemen, the retired officer, the village scribe, the local priest and petty landowner disguised in costumes.”
²⁰

Dostoevsky had read the harangues of Serno-Solovievich, and the young radical is mentioned, along with Nechaev (no others are identified), as belonging in “the herd of swine” infected by “the devils” who “came out of the body of Russian man.” Dostoevsky, of course, could have had no knowledge of Herzen’s letter, but he was able to intuit, with remarkable percipience, exactly its mixture of consternation and guilt. “I agree that the author’s fundamental idea is a true one,” Stepan Trofimovich says of
What Is To Be Done?
, the “catechism” of the Nihilists, “but that only makes it more awful. It’s just our idea, exactly ours; we first sowed the seed, nurtured it, prepared the way, and, indeed, what could they say new, after us? But, heavens! How it’s all expressed, distorted, mutilated. . . . Were these the conclusions we were striving for? Who can understand the original idea in this?” (10: 238).

Herzen’s last important work,
Letters to an Old Comrade
(1869), was written expressly to counteract the turbulent torrent of vandalism running through the Bakunin-Nechaev propaganda. These open letters addressed to Bakunin were included in a collection of Herzen’s posthumous writings that Dostoevsky certainly would have hastened to procure. “The savage clamors exhorting us to close our books, to abandon science, and to engage in an absurd combat of destruction,” Herzen wrote, “belong to the most uncontrollable and baneful demagoguery. They always provoke the unleashing of the worst passions. We juggle with terrible words, without thinking at all of the harm they do to the cause and to those who listen to them.”
²¹
Herzen certainly did not believe that the Bakunin-Nechaev movement, which had led to the murder of Ivanov, was merely an isolated and aberrant episode, and he felt it his duty to raise his voice against the terrible consequences he could so clearly foresee.

One can well imagine Dostoevsky’s satisfaction at reading Herzen’s condemnatory words, which to him could well have sounded almost as a self-denunciation and recantation. And while Dostoevsky did not need Herzen to teach him the value of art and culture (he had defended them against Belinsky in 1849 and Dobrolyubov in 1861), he would surely have been gratified to find Herzen aligning himself so fervently against the Pisarevian iconoclasm (in the literal sense of the word) that had become endemic among the generation of the 1860s.
“Woe to the revolution poor in spirit and weak in a sense of art,” Herzen exclaims, “which will make of all that has been acquired by time a depressing workshop, and whose sole interest would be subsistence and nothing but subsistence!” One recalls here the notorious slogan of Peter Verkhovensky: “Only the necessary is necessary, that’s the motto of the whole world henceforward” (10: 323). “The force of unleashed destruction,” Herzen continues, “will wipe out, along with the limits of property, the
peaks
of human endeavor that men have attained in every direction since the beginning of civilization. . . . I have often felt this keenly when, overcome by a gloomy sadness and almost shame, I have stood before some guide who showed me a bare wall, a broken sculpture, a coffin torn from its tomb, and who repeated: ‘All this was destroyed during the Revolution.’ ”
²²

Only against this background can one fully appreciate Stepan Trofimovich’s defiant “last word” in
Demons
—a last word shouted at a hooting, jeering younger generation that hounded him as unmercifully as it had hounded Herzen in his last years, and to which he replied with the voice of Herzen and that of Dostoevsky as well. “ ‘But I maintain,’ Stepan Trofimovich shrilled at the utmost pitch of excitement, ‘I maintain that Shakespeare and Raphael are higher than the emancipation of the serfs, higher than Nationalism, higher than Socialism, higher than the young generation, higher than chemistry, higher than almost all humanity because they are the fruit, the real fruit of all humanity, and perhaps the highest possible fruit! A form of beauty already attained, without whose attainment I, perhaps, would not consent to live. . . . Oh, God’ he cried—he clasped his hands—‘ten years ago I cried exactly the same thing in Petersburg in exactly the same words, and they understood nothing in exactly the same way, they laughed and hissed as now; you pygmies, what do you need to make you understand?’ ” (10: 372–373). Ten years before, in
The Superfluous and the Bilious
, Herzen had anticipated these very words, and Dostoevsky’s boisterously uproarious fête, which also includes other incidents and allusions taken from the stormy events of the early 1860s, is the artistic enshrinement of this momentous historical-cultural clash.

Stepan Trofimovich, to be sure, is not the only figure in the book who represents an eminent member of the generation of the 1840s. No account of
Demons
would be complete without some discussion of the malicious but masterly caricature of Turgenev in the portrait of Karmazinov (
Karmazin
, from the French
cramoisi
, means crimson in Russian and ridicules the presumed social-political sympathies of the Great Writer). Personal caricature was commonplace in Russian
fiction, and Turgenev himself had not spared Bakunin in
Rudin
or a host of well-known personalities (particularly Ogarev) in
Smoke
. But to find an equally extended lampoon of a prominent literary personage one would probably have to look to Dickens’s attack on Leigh Hunt in
Bleak House
through the character of Harold Skimpole.

Karmazinov bears no physical resemblance to the handsome figure of the stately Turgenev, but otherwise Dostoevsky’s target is unmistakable, and he ridicules all those aspects of his fellow novelist that had long aroused his antipathy. Turgenev’s aristocratic airs and manner, his preference for residence in Europe, his demolition of Russian culture in
Smoke
, the philosophical pessimism revealed most overtly in his prose poems, the squeamish, self-protective egoism that Dostoevsky saw most blatantly manifested in the article about the execution of Troppman—nothing is spared! The first encounter between the narrator and the Great Writer is accompanied by a derisory parody of the Troppman article, transposed into an account of the wreck of a steamer off the English coast. As a young man, Turgenev had been involved in such a wreck off Lübeck (he later wrote about it in 1883, after Dostoevsky’s death), and widespread rumor in literary circles attributed to him a behavior that was far from heroic.

Just as when Troppman was guillotined, Karmazinov-Turgenev is much more concerned with his own reactions than with the victims of the disaster. “All this rather long and verbose article was written solely with the object of self-display. One seemed to read between the lines: . . . ‘Why look at that drowned woman with the dead child in her dead arms? Look rather at me, see how I was unable to bear the sight and turned away from it. Here I stood with my back to it, here I was horrified and could not bring myself to look; I blinked my eyes—isn’t that interesting?’ ” “When I told Stepan Trofimovich my opinion of Karmazinov’s article,” the narrator adds, “he quite agreed with me” (10: 70).

Although Karmazinov’s vanity and narcissism are thus displayed from the start, his role is defined more broadly by the attempts of Turgenev to worm his way back into the good graces of the generation of the 1860s. In contrast to Herzen’s forthright and staunch defense of his own values, which then became embodied in Stepan Trofimovich, Turgenev had ignominiously truckled to Nihilist browbeating, implicitly giving his stamp of approval to Bazarovism and, by extension, to its latest avatar, Sergey Nechaev. Of course, the presumed approval of Nechaev was not literally true, but in the symbolic myth of Dostoevsky’s creation it is perfectly defensible. Karmazinov is responsible for Peter Verkhovensky’s prestige in society, just as Turgenev had been responsible for the prestige of Bazarov and his later offshoots in real life, and he acts as the young man’s mentor and advocate. “When I came, I assured everyone,” he tells Peter, “that you were a very intelligent man, and now I believe everyone is wild over you” (10: 286). As A. S. Dolinin has shrewdly noted, even though Stepan Trofimovich
is the physical father of Peter Verkhovensky, the latter is much more the “spiritual son” of Karmazinov.
²³

The climax of Dostoevsky’s ridicule of Turgenev occurs during the fête scene, when Karmazinov condescendingly agrees to read his farewell work to the hungry and fractious assemblage, having decided—or so he pretends—to put down his pen forever after his last appearance in public. Turgenev, upon receiving a letter of sympathy from a friend after the publication of this chapter, replied in a hurt tone of restrained dignity: “It is surely curious that he chose for his parody the sole work [
Phantoms
] that I placed in the journal he once edited, a work for which he showered me with grateful and flattering letters. I still have the letters. It would be amusing to publish them! But he knows that I will not do such a thing. I am only left with the regret that he employs his undoubted talent to satisfy such unsavory feelings.”
²⁴

Phantoms
is by no means the main basis for Dostoevsky’s parody, which in fact takes off from another prose poem,
Enough
(
Dovol’no
). Turgenev’s temperament is given free rein in these prose poems, whose dominant mood, often expressed by dreamlike events unrestrained by the limits of time and space, is a sense of world-weariness and metaphysical despair. Dostoevsky takes well-directed aim against these extremely vulnerable aspects of Turgenev’s prose poems, which are easy enough to ridicule simply by introducing a note of sober prosaicism into their lugubrious fantasy. Time and again, as he does so, Dostoevsky also mocks the self-importance impelling the great genius to reduce every event and incident to a reflection of his own existential anguish. In one scene, the poet is presumably drowning after falling through the ice of the Volga in a thaw, but then “he caught sight of a tiny little ice floe, the size of a pea . . . and . . . its iridescent glitter recalled to his mind the very same tear, which you remember rolled down from your eyes when we sat beneath the emerald tree and you cried joyfully, ‘There is no crime.’ ‘No,’ I said, through my tears, ‘but if that is so, there are no saints either.’ We burst into sobs and parted forever” (10: 366–367). This is a hit at Turgenev’s newly proclaimed adhesion to Nihilism, whose moral-metaphysical negation is here portrayed in a ridiculously burlesque register rather than, as with Stavrogin, in a tragic one.