Dostoevsky (160 page)

The first issue of the
Diary
opens on the spate of suicides among young people then disquieting Russian opinion; and this theme will be the inspiration for a number of Dostoevsky’s most moving stories. “And there is not a moment,” Dostoevsky comments sadly about these incidents, “of Hamlet’s pondering ‘that dread of something after death’ ” (22: 6). Indirectly, the question of immortality is thus broached, uniting an eternal “accursed question” with the dispiriting news on which he reports. Dostoevsky returned to the theme in October 1876, prompted by the recent suicide of the seventeen-year-old daughter of a “very well-known Russian émigré.” Herzen’s daughter Elizaveta had taken her life, and Dostoevsky cited her suicide note, written in French, requesting that, if her suicide did not succeed, her family and friends should gather “to celebrate my resurrection with Clicquot.” Otherwise, she asked that her death be ascertained before burial, “because it is most unpleasant to awake in the coffin underground.
That would not be chic at all
.” He contrasts such words with those of a second suicide, “the humble [
smirennoe
] suicide,” of a poor, young St. Petersburg seamstress who “jumped and fell to the ground,
holding an icon in her hands
” (23: 144–146).

Both these deaths haunted his imagination, and the second inspired one of his most beautiful stories, “A Gentle Creature.” The suicide of Liza Herzen led to the composition of an imaginary suicide note, entitled “The Sentence.” Devoting a few paragraphs to Liza Herzen, he compassionately senses, underneath the strained flippancy of her tone, a protest against the “stupidity” of mankind’s appearance on earth and the oppressive tyranny of a meaningless causality to which humankind can never become reconciled. Without any conscious awareness of such matters, the young girl had nonetheless been affected by the “linearity” of the ideas “conveyed to her since childhood in her father’s house” (23: 145). These ideas—of atheism and materialism—ultimately impelled her to take her own life. To express their disastrous effect in its most powerful form, Dostoevsky then prints his fictive suicide note.

The writer of the imaginary suicide note refuses to accept, in the name of some hypothetical paradisiacal bliss, the suffering necessarily imposed by being born a conscious human being who, as an atheist, does not believe in immortality. The inconsolable thought of her own extinction impels the writer to see in the creation of human beings, and particularly of himself, “some sort of the most profound disrespect for mankind, which, to me, is profoundly insulting,
and all the more unbearable as here there is no one who is guilty” (23: 146–147). Rather than endure the humiliation of existing in a senseless universe, where mankind is merely the plaything of a cruel and sadistic nature, he chooses suicide, as the only honorable protest against the indignity of having been born.

The repercussions of this article anticipate much of the later history of Dostoevsky interpretation. So powerfully had he presented the point of view he was opposing, so penetratingly had he entered into a consciousness whose dangers he wished to expose, that he was immediately accused of supporting what he was striving to combat. “The moment my article was printed,” he wrote in December 1876, “I was swamped—by letters and personal callers—with inquiries as to the meaning of ‘The Sentence.’ ” Taking up the question publicly, he leaves no doubt that he had tried to express “the formula of a logical suicide”—the only possible conclusion about life as a whole that, in his view, could be drawn by an atheist and materialist. “I have expressed this ‘last word of science’ in brief terms, clearly and popularly, with the sole purpose of refuting it—not by reasoning or logic, since it cannot be refuted by logic . . . but by faith, by the deduction of the necessity of faith in the immortality of the soul” (24: 53).

It is impossible, he stresses, to give life a meaning by substituting beneficent social action for religious faith. For he insists that, where religious faith is lacking, a true “love of mankind” not only is impossible but runs the risk of being transformed into its opposite. The thought of all the unredeemed suffering that mankind has endured, and the impossibility of alleviating that suffering, cannot help but turn the initial love into hate. Addressing the Populists directly, he writes: “Those who, having deprived man of his faith in immortality, are seeking to substitute for it—as life’s loftiest aim—‘love of mankind,’ those, I maintain, are lifting their arms against themselves, since in lieu of love of mankind they are planting in the heart of him who has lost his faith seeds of the hatred of mankind” (24: 49). Such words anticipate the creation of that despairing idealist Ivan Karamazov, who will find himself caught in exactly such a love-hate relation to mankind.

The image of “the humble suicide” continued to haunt Dostoevsky’s imagination, and in late October he decided to use it as the subject for a story. At first he thought of making “the girl with the icon” an episode in a novel (never written) called
The Dreamer
(
Mechtatel
’). Some features of this early draft were retained in the final story, among them the monologue form and a main character who had refused to fight a duel and was convinced that he was seeking the naked truth. Work on the
Diary
, however, left no time to develop this novel project. Deciding that the theme was rich enough to deserve independent treatment, however, he turned to his old notes. What he found there was his longstanding
fascination with the figure of a “usurer”—the base epitome of an egoistic selfishness excluding any concern for others.

Notes for such a figure appear in a plan for a novel in the early 1860s, and were taken up again in 1869 as an idea for a story after the completion of
The Idiot
. The character here is described as “a genuine underground type; has been insulted. Becomes embittered. Immeasurable vanity. . . . His wife cannot fail to notice that he is cultivated, but then realized, not very much; every gibe (and he takes everything as a gibe) angers him, he is suspicious. . . . For a time he endeavors to establish a loving relationship with his wife. But he had broken her heart” (24: 382). This situation already contains an outline of the later story.

Another plan for a story, set down at the same time but never written, gives a more extended description of the psychology associated with the usurer:

These are the contours of the character whose voice will be heard as the narrator of “A Gentle Creature.” Although the idea for this story first emerged in Dostoevsky’s thoughts about “the girl with the icon,” by the time the story took final shape she had receded into the background. Instead, her husband, the narrator, comes to the forefront, and what gives him a special stamp is the character of his self-image. He sees himself as some sort of misunderstood and neglected hero, whose life is a personal protest against an unjust society, and this self-image sustains him emotionally and motivates his behavior. It is what has made life possible for him since—in a rather stock situation in the repertoire of Russian Romanticism—he had been expelled from his regiment for having failed to defend its honor on some public occasion.

Before we learn the details of his past, however, the narrator is shown simply as the proprietor of a pawnshop; and this role again strikes a familiar Dostoevskian note. A preoccupation with money is usually the symptom of a lust for power stemming from a status of inferiority and subordination. So it is here again; but complicated by the character’s need to persuade himself of his own rectitude and virtue. “You say ‘pawnbroker’—everybody says it. And what of it? This means that there must, indeed, have been reasons why one of the most magnanimous of all men became a pawnbroker” (24: 16). The narrator refuses to view himself as he knows he is regarded by others—and even by some part of himself that he cannot suppress. This discrepancy is the source of the tragedy recounted in the story,
which arises from the narrator’s pitiless attempt, in a hopeless search for love and understanding, to impose his own self-conception on another. But because he seeks love without being willing to love (until it is too late), because he wishes to obtain love through the domination of another consciousness, the result is the very opposite of what he desires. “But here,” he thinks, looking at the corpse of his dead wife, “there was something I forgot or failed to see” (24: 17).

The story traces the course of the unhappy relationship that led the child-bride to her final, despairing plunge. What attracts the narrator to the girl, when she first comes to pawn her meager belongings, is the combination of her pride and her poverty, her intelligence and her indigence. The death of her parents threw her back on two aunts, who had turned her into a virtual slave. But she is an independent character who has absorbed some of the culture and humanitarian ideals of her generation and has placed advertisements in journals in search of a position (to no avail). By no means is she ready to play a completely subservient role.

The narrator rescues her from being, in effect, sold to a much older suitor. His unexpected proposal of marriage is carefully designed to cast him in the role of a Romantic savior, but his motive is neither genuine magnanimity nor even sexual attraction (though the latter is not entirely absent). Rather, he desperately yearns for someone to recognize his outwardly demeaning life as inspired by an “idea,” someone to acknowledge the inherent righteousness and dignity of the path he has chosen, someone to look beyond his ignominious profession and dishonored past into the torments of his wounded soul. “Admitting her to my house, I desired full respect. I wished that she should look at me worshipfully for all my suffering—and I deserved it! I was always proud, and I always sought either everything or nothing” (24: 14).

This overwhelming pride determines the baneful course he adopts after the marriage. Any sign of tenderness or affection on his part might be interpreted as a humiliating appeal, as an indication of remorse or self-doubt. And so the young girl’s natural warmth of feeling, spontaneously expressed in the first days of their marriage, is stifled by his policy of coldness and seeming indifference. “The main thing was that from the very beginning, much as she tried to restrain herself, she threw herself at me with love. . . . But at once I threw cold water on all this ecstasy. Precisely therein was my idea. I reacted to these transports with silence—benevolent, of course” (12: 13).

This treatment leads to the reverse of what the narrator had anticipated. Rather than her accepting the inner sublimity (as he sees it) of her husband’s way of life, and bowing down before him in worshipful admiration, they become locked in a secret struggle of wills. “At first she argued—how hotly!—but later she left off speaking, and, finally, she grew quite silent; only, when listening, she would open her eyes awfully wide—such big, big eyes, so attentive. . . . 
And . . . and, besides, suddenly I noticed a smile—a distrustful, silent, wicked, smile. Well, it was with that smile that I brought her into my house” (12: 14).

Ultimately, however, the supposedly “gentle creature” unexpectedly erupts into outright rebellion. At the climax of their secret battle, waking from sleep, he sees her standing over him with a loaded pistol; and he waits in agony for her to pull the trigger, wondering whether she had seen him momentarily open his eyes. Despite her hatred, she is unable to take his life—her final and irreparable defeat. By later revealing his awareness of this incident, he can, at one stroke, remove the cloud hanging over his name because of the imputation of cowardice and also reverse the moral situation. No longer will
he
be the person surreptitiously seeking pardon; he will now be the kindhearted, great-souled pardoner. But the private joy of this future triumph is so great that he purposely puts off its arrival. He wishes to savor the broken mortification of his wife, who falls ill with “brain fever” and never recovers her health. “Yes, at that time there occurred to me something strange and peculiar. . . . I grew triumphant, and the very knowledge of it proved sufficient to me. This winter passes. Oh, I was content as never before—and this, all winter” (24: 23).