Authors: Joseph Frank
In mid-March,
Voice
contained an account of the trial of two foreigners, a couple named Brunst, who were accused of mistreating their five-year-old daughter in a monstrous fashion, and Dostoevsky used some of its details (the smearing of the child’s face with excrement) in Ivan Karamazov’s rebellious vituperation against God for creating a world in which such outrages were possible. Unfortunately, another trial at the time also attracted his attention, that of nine Georgian Jews accused of murdering a young girl in the Kutais district of that region. The girl had disappeared on the eve of Passover, and although the blood libel was not mentioned in the indictment, there had been much discussion in the Russian press, including
The Citizen
, as to whether “fanatical [Jewish] sectarians” kidnapped and killed Christian children to obtain their blood for ritual purposes at this time of year. Everyone thus knew what the charges involved, and it says much in honor of the reformed Russian judicial system that the Kutais Jews, against whom there was no evidence, were acquitted on March 17. An appeal to a higher court a year later met with no more success. Reading the newspaper accounts, Dostoevsky came to an opposite conclusion. Writing to Olga Novikova, whose contributions to the English press earned her the title of “the M. P. from Russia,” he said, “How disgusting that the Kutais Jews are acquitted. They are beyond doubt guilty. I’m persuaded by the trial and by everything, including the vile defense by Alexandrov, who is here a remarkable scoundrel—‘a lawyer is a hired conscience.’ ”
19
This tidbit of news too, alas, becomes part of
The Brothers Karamazov
, whose pages were then causing a furor among the Russian reading public.
Not only was Dostoevsky’s artistic mastery self-evident, but the thematic issue that that the book posed—whether a murder to destroy a monstrous evil could morally be justified—was placed before the same readers practically every time they opened their newspapers. One official after another fell victim to the
revenge of the Populists, who had declared war on the tsarist regime; and on April 2 an attempt was made on the life of the tsar himself. In 1866, when Alexander had escaped assassination, there had been a huge outpouring of national support for the government and widespread rejoicing at the tsar’s good fortune. Nothing even remotely similar occurred this time. As a government commission noted two months later, “especially noteworthy of attention is the almost complete failure of the educated classes to support the government in its fight against a relatively small band of evildoers. . . . They [the educated classes] are . . . waiting for the results of the battle.”
20
Dostoevsky had been almost hysterical on hearing of the failed assassination in 1866, and we may presume that he was also upset this time as well. One episode in the memoir literature has been plausibly linked to this event.
M. V. Kametskaya, the daughter of Anna Filosofova, recalls hearing the doorbell of their apartment ring one day, and when she went to greet the visitor, there was Dostoevsky, “embarrassed, apologetic, [who] suddenly understood that all this was not necessary. He stood before me, his face drained of color, wiping the perspiration from his brow and breathing heavily from having hurried up the stairs. ‘Is Mama home? Well, God be praised!’ Then he took my head in his hands and kissed me on the brow: ‘Well, God be praised! I was just told that you had both been arrested!’ ”
21
A rumor had spread in the city that both mother and daughter had been taken into custody. Although Kametskaya does not specify the date of this visit, it has credibly been placed on the day of the assassination attempt.
22
Indeed, it would not be long before the authorities decided to put a stop altogether to the activities of Filosofova. In November 1879 she was politely but firmly requested to go to Wiesbaden, where she often vacationed, and not to return. Alexander II told her husband that it was only in gratitude for his services that she had not been sent to a much less pleasant place of exile.
Work on
The Brothers Karamazov
continued without a pause, and on April 17 Dostoevsky left for Staraya Russa, where he could continue writing in relative tranquility. The immense success of the sections already published convinced him that his book was touching an acutely aching nerve in the public. If Dostoevsky had any doubts on this score, they would have been dissipated by a letter he received from the influential editor Sergey Yuriev, who had just acquired permission to launch his new journal,
Russian Thought
(
Russkaya Mysl
’). In urging Dostoevsky once more to contribute a novel, he wrote that it would not only “embellish his pages” but also serve to drain “the moral abscess which is eating up our life.”
23
1
DVS
, 2: 444–445.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid., 445.
4
Ibid., 446.
5
Letopis zhizni i tvorchestvo F. M. Dostoevskogo
, ed. N. F. Budanova and G. M. Fridlender, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1995), 3: 303–306.
6
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 247.
7
DVS
, 2: 377.
8
Ibid., 553.
9
Ibid., 377–378.
10
Letopis
, 3: 306.
11
DVS
, 2: 178.
12
Ibid., 192–193.
13
Ibid., 193.
14
Ibid., 378.
15
PSS
, 25: 60.
16
I. Volgin,
Posledny god Dostoevskogo
(Moscow, 1986), 75–76; also,
Letopis
, 3: 308.
17
E. M. de Vogüé,
Le roman Russe
(Paris, 1910), 269.
18
Ibid., 270–271.
19
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 59; March 28, 1879.
20
Franco Venturi,
Roots of Revolution
(New York, 1966), 633.
21
DVS
, 2: 380.
22
Letopis
, 3: 312.
23
Ibid., 314.
Dostoevsky would remain at Staraya Russa until July 17, hard at work on his novel. He was then writing Book 5 of Part 2, “Pro and Contra,” which contains Ivan’s rebellion against God’s world and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. His life during this period was spent entirely tied to his desk, turning out chapter after chapter of his final masterpiece. To avoid misunderstandings that might lead to objections, and perhaps censorship, each section sent to his editor Lyubimov was accompanied by a letter of explanation. These provide a running self-commentary on his ideological and artistic aims that are unique in the corpus of his work.
On May 7, Dostoevsky sent off the first half of Book 5. He describes his intention as “the portrayal of the uttermost blasphemy and the seed of the idea of destruction in our time in Russia among the young people uprooted from reality, and, along with the blasphemy and anarchy—the refutation of them, which is now being prepared by me in the last words of the dying elder Zosima.” He characterizes these convictions of Ivan “as a synthesis of contemporary Russian anarchism. The rejection not of God, but of the meaning of His creation. All of Socialism has sprung from and began with the denial of the meaning of historical reality and ended in a program of destruction and anarchism.”
1
Dostoevsky reserved a separate book for Zosima’s preachments; “Pro and Contra” thus refers only to the inner debate taking place in Ivan between his recognition of the moral sublimity of the Christian ideal and his outrage against a universe of pain and suffering (and on a world-historical scale, by his questioning of the moral foundations of both Christianity and Socialism in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor). The Populists had restored the morality of the Christian God (independently of their own opinions about his divinity) that had been negated in the previous decade; and they were now applying it to his own creation. Indeed, they were rejecting “the meaning of historical reality” that he had presumably established in order to correct his work in light of the very Christian principles he had proclaimed. Ivan’s protest against God’s world is thus couched in terms of the Christian value of compassion—the very value that Dostoevsky
himself (or Myshkin in
The Idiot
) had once called “the chief and perhaps the only law of all human existence” (8: 192). “My heroes take up the theme,” Dostoevsky continues in his letter to Lyubimov, “that I think irrefutable—the senselessness of the suffering of children—and derive from it the absurdity of all historical reality.”
2
Reason or rationality cannot cope with the senselessness of such suffering, and Zosima will respond to it only with a leap of faith in God’s ultimate goodness and mercy.
Invoking the considerable authority of Pobedonostsev, Dostoevsky attempts to counter in advance the usual charges made against him. He informs Lyubimov that, while some of the characters in
Demons
had been criticized as pathological fantasies, they “were all vindicated by reality and therefore had been discerned accurately. I have been told by [Pobedonostsev] about two or three cases of arrested anarchists who were amazingly similar to the ones depicted by me.” All the tortures that Dostoevsky portrays through Ivan’s feverish words were taken from newspaper accounts or from historical sources for which he was ready to give the exact reference. He also assures the editor that his pages do not contain “a single indecent word,” but worries that some of his details might be softened. He “beg[s] and implore[s]” that the expression used in describing the punishment inflicted on a child—“the tormentors who are raising her
smear her with excrement
for not being able to ask to go to the bathroom at night”—be retained. “You mustn’t soften it . . . that would be very, very sad! We are not writing for ten-year-old children.” (The wording was not changed.) And then, turning to a larger issue, Dostoevsky reassures the editor that “my protagonist’s blasphemy . . . will be solemnly refuted in the following (June) issue, on which I am now working with fear, trepidation, and reverence, since I consider my task (the rout of anarchism) a civic feat.”
3
There were ample precedents in Dostoevsky’s work for his thematic focus on the problem of theodicy raised by Ivan—the problem of the existence of evil and suffering in a world presumably created by a God of love. No Judeo-Christian reader can help but think of the book of Job in this connection, and Dostoevsky’s creation is one of the few whose voice rings out with an equal eloquence and an equal anguish. Although there is no explicit reference to Job in the notes for these chapters, his name appears three times in other sections, and Zosima will narrate the story of Job, stressing its consolatory conclusion, in his departing words. Dostoevsky, we know, had written to his wife in 1875 that “I am reading Job and it puts me into a state of painful ecstasy; I leave off reading and I walk about the room almost crying. . . . This book, dear Anna, it’s strange, it was one of the first to impress me in my life. I was still practically
an infant.”
4
This recollection is then attributed to Zosima, who recalls hearing the book of Job read aloud in church at the age of eight, “and I feel as I did then, awe and wonder and gladness. . . . Ever since then . . . I’ve never been able to read that sacred tale without tears” (14: 264–265). Nourished by Dostoevsky’s own grief over the loss of his son Alyosha, this magnificent chapter drew as well on feelings that had been stirring within him throughout his life.
5
In mid-May, Dostoevsky provides another explanation for producing such a troubling and powerful condemnation of God. Repeating that Book 5 “in my novel is the culminating one,” he defines “the point of the book” as being “blasphemy and the refutation of blasphemy.” “The blasphemy I have taken as I myself sensed and realized it, in its strongest form, that is, precisely as it occurs among us now in Russia with the whole (almost) upper stratum, and primarily with the young people, that is, the scientific and philosophical rejection of God’s existence has been abandoned now, today’s practical Socialists don’t bother with it at all (as people did the whole last century and the first half of the present one). But on the other hand God’s creation, God’s world, and
its
meaning are
negated
as strongly as possible. That’s the only thing that contemporary civilization finds nonsensical.”
6
Dostoevsky had always argued that characters like Stavrogin and Kirillov, who were hardly “realistic” in the sense of being recognizably typical, nonetheless revealed the essence of Russian life, and he now maintains that this presentation of Ivan Karamazov is far from being only an artistic invention. “Thus I flatter myself,” he insists, “that even in such an abstract theme [the rejection of God’s world], I have not betrayed realism. The refutation of this (not direct, that is, not from one person to another) will appear in the last words of the dying elder. Many critics have reproached me for generally taking up in my novels themes that are allegedly wrong, unreal, and so forth. I, on the contrary, don’t
know anything more real than precisely these themes.”
7
His technique had always been to refute the ideas he was combating “indirectly,” by dramatizing their consequences on the fate of his characters.
Dostoevsky also offers pointed instructions on how to read his works, and indicates how carefully he created the closely woven texture of his characters. In the
Diary
, he was writing in his own name and voice, whereas
now, here, in the novel
it is not I who am
speaking in distressing colors, exaggerations, and hyperboles (although there is no exaggeration concerning the reality), but a character of my novel, Ivan Karamazov. This is
his
language,
his
style,
his
pathos, and not mine. He is a gloomily irritable person who keeps silent about a good deal. He would not have spoken out for anything in the world if not for the accidental sympathy for his brother Aleksey that suddenly flares up. Besides, he is a very young man. How else could he speak out on what he had kept silent for so long without this particular transport of feeling, without foaming at the mouth. He had strained his heart to the utmost so as not to break forth. But I precisely wanted his character to stand out, and that the reader notice this particular passion, this leap, this literary, impulsively sudden behavior.
8