Dostoevsky (157 page)
Authors: Joseph Frank
There are numerous contemporary accounts of the religiously charged atmosphere that surrounded the trial of “the fifty,” during which, according to the Populist radical writer Stepniak-Kravchinsky, the word “saints” was often heard uttered about the defendants by those in the courtroom.
33
D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky writes:
Not all, perhaps, but very many of those who went to the people were inspired . . . by the evangelical ideal of loving one’s neighbor, and of sacrificing one’s worldly goods and personal happiness. When the so-called “trial of the fifty” disclosed the activity of young women self-sacrificingly carrying the “good news” of Socialism, motifs from the Gospels, parallels with the Sermon on the Mount, involuntarily came to mind. These young women could look forward in life to happiness and satisfaction, among them were some with considerable wealth. . . . But they preferred to this the life of a saint, they exchanged their happiness for a heroic deed, and sacrificed themselves for a high ideal, which seemed to them only a new expression of this very same evangelical ideal.
34
At the trial, in a speech that quickly became famous, one of the accused, Sophia Bardini, declared, “As regards religion [whose precepts she had been accused of violating], I may say only that I have always remained faithful to its existing principles, in that pure form in which it was preached by the founder of Christianity.”
35
One of the last poems that Nekrasov wrote on his deathbed was inspired by this trial, and there is good reason to believe that it echoed in Dostoevsky’s work as well. Just a year later, he began to draft
The Brothers Karamazov
; and when he came to describe his young hero, Alyosha, whose life would constitute the second (never written) volume, he wrote, “if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and Socialist (for Socialism is . . . the question of the Tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth” (14: 25). Alyosha’s innate goodness and craving for justice led him to become a novice in a monastery once he had decided in favor of God and immortality. Both he and the Socialists look forward to the reign of goodness and charitable
love; they differ only on whether it should be attained under the guidance of a secular or a supernatural Christ.
It was not only through his next novel, however, that Dostoevsky hoped to influence the young radicals to follow the way of Alyosha. For over two years he had attempted to do so in the
Diary of a Writer
. Let us now turn back for a closer look at this massive publication, which dominated Russian public opinion as no such journal had ever done before.
1
Anna Dostoevsky,
Reminiscences
, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 213.
2
Cited in
DVS
, 2: 364–365.
3
Ibid., 286.
4
Ibid., 282–283.
5
Ibid., 285.
6
PSS
, 29/Bk. 2: 66–67; November 10, 1875.
7
Ibid., 75–76; March 10, 1876.
8
Ibid., 78; April 9, 1876.
9
DVS
, 2: 242–243.
10
Ibid.
11
Cited in the commentary to the letter of Maslannikov, the lawyer who offered his help, in
Dostoevsky i ego vremya
(Leningrad, 1971), 277.
12
PSS
, 29/Bk. 2: 79; April 9, 1876.
13
Ibid.
14
DVS
, 337.
15
PSS
, 29/Bk. 2: 95–98; July 13/25, 1876.
16
Reminiscences
, 264.
17
PSS
, 29/Bk. 2: 105; July 18/30, 1876.
18
Ibid., 104; July 21/August 2, 1876.
19
Ibid., 117; July 30/August 11, 1876.
20
Ibid., 99–100; July 15/27, 1876.
21
Ibid., 101–103; July 16/28, 1876.
22
Ibid., 271; November 13, 1876.
23
Ibid., 132–133; November 16, 1876.
24
Reminiscences
, 283.
25
PSS
, 29/Bk. 2: 163; July 7, 1877.
26
Ibid., 80; April 15, 1876.
27
Ibid., 170–173; July 17, 1877.
28
Ibid., 176–177; December 7, 1877.
29
Ibid., 178–179; December 17, 1877.
30
Ibid.
31
Reminiscences
, 288.
32
PSS
, 26: 112–113; 416.
33
See Franco Venturi,
The Roots of Revolution
(New York, 1966), 586.
34
D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, “Istoria Russkoi intelligentsia,”
Sobranie sochinenii
, 10 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1910–1911), 8: 193–194.
35
Quoted in V. Bogucharsky,
Aktivnoe narodnichestvo semidesyatikh godov
(Moscow, 1912), 298.
The Diary of a Writer
, 1876–1877
The ideas promulgated in the
Diary of a Writer
were already familiar from Dostoevsky’s earlier journalism, as well as from the ideological flights of his novels. But they are given new life and color by the constant parade of fresh examples drawn from his omnivorous reading of the current press, from his wide knowledge of history and literature both Russian and European, and, very frequently, from the events of his own life. Such autobiographical revelations were certainly one of the main attractions of the
Diary
; readers felt they were truly being admitted into the intimacy of one of their great men. This constant interplay between the personal and the public—the incessant shift of level between the social problems of the day, the “accursed questions” that have always plagued human life, and the glimpses into the recesses of Dostoevsky’s own private life and sensibility—proved an irresistible combination that gave the
Diary
its unique literary cachet.
In addition, the
Diary
served as a stimulus not only for short stories and sketches but also, as he had anticipated, for the major novel he was planning to write. Time and again motifs appear that will soon be utilized in
The Brothers Karamazov
. Even if not literally a notebook, the
Diary
lives up to this name in the exact sense of the word. It is genuinely the working tool of a writer in the early stages of creation—a writer who searches for (and finds) the inspiration for his work as, pen in hand, he surveys the passing scene and attempts to cope with its deeper import.
In the 1860s, Dostoevsky’s journals had advanced a doctrine of
pochvennichestvo
, advocating the return of the intelligentsia to their own native soil, to their own culture and its moral-religious roots and values. This conception of the ideal relation between the intelligentsia and the people forms the background for the treatment of this question in the
Diary
. The peasants were liberated with land, Dostoevsky writes in the June 1876 issue, “because we saw ourselves as Russians, with the Tsar at our head, exactly as the landowner Pushkin dreamed forty years
ago, when . . . he cursed his European upbringing and turned to the principles of the people” (22: 120).
1
“Our demos is content,” he announces with astonishing complacency, “and the further we go, the more satisfied it will become, for everything is moving toward that end via the common mood, or, to put it better, the general consensus” (22: 122). Dostoevsky was firmly persuaded that the governing class would continue to act in the name of the people’s own supposedly Christian ideals. When many readers vociferously objected that the Russian demos was far from being satisfied, he took their criticisms only as additional proof of the good will of the educated class and further corroboration of his point of view (“even now no one here will stand up for the idea that we must bestialize one group of people for the welfare of another group that represents civilization, such as is the case all over Europe”) (22: 31).
In a February 1876 entry dealing with Konstantin Aksakov, Dostoevsky restates the key ideas of
pochvennichestvo
. Putting the question bluntly, he asks: “Who is better, we [the intelligentsia] or the people?” And he answers: “we must bow down before the people’s truth and acknowledge it as the truth, even in the awful event that some of it comes from the
Lives of the Saints
” (22: 44). “In what way,” he asks, “did we, the cultured people, become
morally and essentially
superior to the people when we returned from Europe?” (22: 110). The answer that he gives is unequivocal: in no way at all, and in fact, quite the contrary.
The same point is made when he discusses the example of Foma Danilov in the January 1877 issue. This Russian soldier, captured in Turkestan, had refused under torture to convert to Islam (Smerdyakov, in
The Brothers Karamazov
, thinks he was a fool). A pension had recently been awarded his impoverished family by the tsar, and for Dostoevsky he becomes “what amounts to the portrait, the complete picture of the Russian people.” It is time for the intelligentsia to ask themselves whether there is “something moral, something sublime to pass on to them [the people], to explain to them, and thus to bring light to their dark souls?” Not at all. “The people have Foma Danilovs by the thousands, while we have no faith at all in Russian strength” (25: 12–17).
The most important political event affecting the
Diary
was the outbreak of a revolt against Turkish rule in the Slavic province of Herzegovina during the summer of 1875. In mid-June 1876, the independent Slav principalities of Serbia and Montenegro also declared war against Turkey. In April 1877, Russia joined the conflict in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, whose immediate cause was the Turkish refusal to agree to Russian demands to accord more rights to Balkan
Christians living under Turkish rule. Dostoevsky was a member of the Slavic Benevolent Society, which had been in the forefront of Pan-Slavic agitation, and was a fervent supporter of both the rebellion and the war. More and more of the articles in the
Diary
, especially in 1877, proclaimed the momentous moral-spiritual consequences, for Russia and for world history, of what seemed to others merely another struggle for territory and power. Their inflammatory appeal, justifying the war on the highest moral-religious principles, helped to stir up patriotic fervor and evoked widespread response.
If Dostoevsky could brilliantly sweep aside denigrations of the people, it was still difficult for him to produce evidence to support his own contrary view of their exalted moral essence. The declaration of war by Serbia and Montenegro against Turkey was a godsend. The Russian volunteer movement, organized to support the Slavs, led to a mass outpouring not only of material aid but also of men volunteering to join the Serbian Army and women to serve as nurses. The people had embarked on “a new crusade” because they had heard that “their Slav brethren were being tortured and oppressed.” No such solidarity had been expected of this “supposedly homogeneous and torpid mass.” It certified for Dostoevsky that the Russian people still admired someone “who continually works for God’s cause, who loves the truth, and who, when it is necessary, rises up to serve that truth, leaving his home and his family and sacrificing his life.” This is why, as he informs his readers, “we can joyously allow ourselves to hope anew, our horizon has cleared, and our new sun rises with dazzling brilliance” (23: 161–162).
The final stage of Dostoevsky’s apotheosis of the Russian people came after the Russian declaration of war against Turkey. Now he argues that the Russian people possess as well the capacity to create a new Christian world order. Indeed, this was the basis on which Dostoevsky believed that the people and the educated class could be brought together. The Europeanized Russian intellectuals and the people are united, with no awareness of their agreement, in the faith that Russia “will pronounce the greatest word that the world has heard,” and that this word will be the mandate for the unity of all humanity in a spirit transcending “personal egoism” and “the struggle for existence” that “now unites people and nations artificially and unnaturally” (25: 19–20). Because Dostoevsky made no distinction between the Russian state and the Russian people, such lofty pronouncements also served to provide a morally attractive façade for Russian imperialism in the Balkans and Central Asia.
No question at this time agitated Dostoevsky more viscerally than the movement to liberate the Balkan Slavs. Even his review of Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
focused on what the novel disclosed about the present state of Russian society
and its opposing attitudes toward the Balkan Slavs. He vehemently attacks Tolstoy—already showing traces of his future pacifism and doctrine of nonresistance to evil—for having denigrated the Russian volunteer movement. Levin ridicules this military initiative as artificial and insincere, whipped up by propaganda rather than inspired by any true, spontaneous feelings of sympathy with brother Slavs. Dostoevsky took such words, with good reason, as a direct challenge to the views he had so passionately expressed in his
Diary
. And he thus mercilessly rips apart this new aspect of Levin, who is now revealed to be not really one of “the people” at all. Hence he cannot genuinely understand the national impulse that had arisen spontaneously to aid the Balkan Slavs.