Dostoevsky (17 page)

The influence of such ideas, intermingled with other Sandian notions bearing on the relations between the sexes, is perceptible in Belinsky’s exposition of his new credo. “And there will come a time—I fervently believe it—when no one will be burned, no one will be decapitated, when the criminal will plead for death . . . and death will be denied him . . . when there will be no senseless forms and rites, no contracts and stipulations on feeling, no duty and obligation, and we shall not yield to will but to love alone; when there will be no husbands and wives, but lovers and mistresses, and when the mistress comes to the lover saying: ‘I love another,’ the lover will answer: ‘I cannot be happy without you, I shall suffer all my life, but go to him whom you love,’ and will not accept her sacrifice, . . . but like God will say to her: I want blessings, not sacrifices. . . . There will be neither rich nor poor, neither kings nor subjects, there will be brethren, there will be men, and, at the word of the Apostle Paul, Christ will pass his power to the Father, and Father-Reason will hold sway once more, but this time in a new heaven and above a new world.”
¹⁹
This will be the realization, as Belinsky rightly says himself, of the dream of “the Golden Age,” and this dream is what Belinsky refers to as “Socialism.”

Belinsky’s conversion to this kind of Socialism initiated a new phase in Russian culture of the 1840s. Annenkov, who had left Russia in the midst of Belinsky’s Hegelian period, returned to Petersburg in 1843 to find, much to his
surprise, that the Petersburg literati were enthralled by the very same works he had heard about in Paris. “Proudhon’s book,
De la propriété
, then almost out of date, Cabet’s
Icarie
, little read in France itself except by a small circle of poor worker-dreamers, the far more widespread and popular system of Charles Fourier—all these served as objects of study, of impassioned discussions, of questions and expectations of every sort, and understandably so. . . . Whole phalanxes of Russians . . . were overjoyed at the chance to change over from abstract, speculative thought without real content to just the same kind of abstract thought but now with a seemingly real content. . . . The books of the authors already named were in everybody’s hands in those days; they were subjected to thoroughgoing study and discussion; they produced, as Schelling and Hegel had done earlier, their spokesmen, commentators, interpreters, and even, somewhat later—something that had not occurred in connection with earlier theories—their martyrs, too.”
²⁰

All this intellectual agitation at first went on only in the closed small circle of Belinsky’s friends—the nucleus of what later came to be called his Pléiade.
²¹
But this circle was composed, at the same time, of the core of his staff of
Notes of the Fatherland
, and the ideas that were stirring them soon began to find their way into its pages. There was, for example, a renewed flurry of interest in George Sand, whose novels now began to be translated almost as soon as they appeared in Paris. Much more notice was also given to the new French literature, and attention was discreetly called to its subversive social message. Most important of all, however, was the providential publication of
Dead Souls
—a true godsend for Belinsky. For this gave him a new Russian work of major artistic stature through which he could translate his ardent social concerns into immediately relevant Russian terms.

The intrigue of Gogol’s
Dead Souls
deals directly with serfdom as his chief protagonist Chichikov travels through the Russian provinces purchasing “dead souls,” serfs who have died but whose names are still on the tax list and retain some economic value. His provincial landowners are a remarkable gallery of mindless grotesques, limned by the hand of a master and totally appalling in the complacent sloth, triviality, and sordidness of their lives. Belinsky eagerly seized on the book as an exposure of the grim horrors of Russian reality, which, after his Hegelian debauch, he now found even more unbearable. Naturally, one
could not speak about such matters too openly in public print; but Belinsky was a master at conveying his ideas in Aesopian language. There was no mistaking what Belinsky meant when he called
Dead Souls
“a purely Russian and national creation . . . pitilessly tearing the cover off reality and filled with a passionate, impatient, urgent love for the fruitful core of Russian life” (read: the enslaved Russian peasant).
²²

Between 1843 and 1845, one spoke of little else in Russian literary journalism except
Dead Souls
. “It seemed as if [Belinsky] considered it the mission of his life,” Annenkov writes, “to make the content of
Dead Souls
immune to any supposition that it harbored in it anything other than a true picture, artistically, spiritually, and ethnographically speaking, of the contemporary position of Russian society. . . . He tirelessly pointed out, both by word of mouth and in print, what the right attitudes toward it were, urging his auditors and readers at every opportunity to think over, but to do so seriously and sincerely, the question as to why types of such repulsiveness as were brought out in the novel . . . exist in Russia without horrifying anyone.”
²³

Belinsky’s critical campaign was accompanied by general exhortations to Russian writers to follow Gogol’s example. Literature, he now maintained, should turn to contemporary society for its material; and he declared George Sand the greatest of all moderns because he found in her the “vital convictions”
²⁴
lacking in Hugo and Balzac. By 1844, in a survey of Russian literature of the previous year, Belinsky was already hailing the appearance of a new school that “deals with the most vital problems of life, destroys the old inveterate prejudices and raises its voice in indignation against the deplorable aspects of contemporary morals and manners, laying bare in all its stark and grim reality ‘all that is constantly before the gaze, but which unseeing eyes heed not, all the frightful appalling mass of trivialities in which our life is steeped, all the depth of cold, disintegrated everyday characters with which our earth teems.’ ”
²⁵

Belinsky here is talking about the young writers of the Natural School who had just begun to loom on the horizon and whose works were being published in
Notes of the Fatherland
. This group (not yet baptized) had emerged in response to Belinsky’s call for a new literature of social realism, but instead of taking the provincial world of
Dead Souls
as their model, its members were far more influenced by the Petersburg setting of “The Overcoat,” which coincided opportunely with the latest foreign literary fashion of the physiological sketch. D. V. Grigorovich, Dostoevsky’s erstwhile fellow student at the academy, recalls that “[i]mitators immediately began to appear in Russia. . . . Nekrasov, whose practical
mind was always on the lookout, . . . imagined a publication in several small volumes:
The Physiology of Petersburg
.”
²⁶
Invited to write one of these sketches, and deciding to concentrate on the life of the Italian organ-grinders in Petersburg, Grigorovich began to haunt their performances and take notes. “I had . . . then already begun to feel . . . the desire to depict reality as it genuinely is, as Gogol depicts it in “The Overcoat”.”
²⁷
In the early autumn of 1844, running into Dostoevsky on the street, Grigorovich dragged him home to get his opinion of this new work.

By the time he chanced upon Grigorovich, Dostoevsky had already begun to go through a similar literary evolution. Until 1842, and despite his sympathy for the compassionate humanitarianism of the French social Romantics, it is clear that Dostoevsky was still laboring in the literary traces of the dominant taste of the 1830s. There had been, after all, no current of critical opinion in Russia indicating any other direction to follow for a young aspirant to literary fame. Belinsky’s campaign on behalf of Gogol, however, and the transformation of
Notes of the Fatherland
into a Russian outpost of the French “Socialist” tendency, changed the entire picture at one stroke. And since Dostoevsky had become emotionally committed to the moral ideals of this movement a good while before Belinsky, it is not difficult to understand the alacrity with which he climbed aboard the new cultural bandwagon.

Beginning in 1843, we find the first references to his intense and enthusiastic preoccupation with Gogol. Of all Russian writers, Riesenkampf tells us, Dostoevsky “was particularly fond of reading Gogol, and loved to declaim pages of
Dead Souls
by heart.”
²⁸
If
The Jew Yankel
was finished by the latter part of January 1844, then it must have been written sometime in the autumn and winter of 1843, and it would represent Dostoevsky’s first response to the changed climate of Russian literature created by the joint efforts of Gogol and Belinsky.

Most of the other information about Dostoevsky’s literary activities depicts him as totally absorbed in the new trend. He was, for example, an assiduous reader of the French
roman-feuilleton
, which, in the early 1840s, had become a staple of French journalism and was one of the most effective means by which humanitarian and Socialist ideas were being propagated. He proposed to Mikhail in late 1843 a joint venture to translate and publish Eugène Sue’s
Mathilde
—the first novel in which Sue addressed social problems. (The project was abandoned for lack of funds.) Dostoevsky also read the muckraking
Les mystères de Paris
(in which Sue popularized certain Fourierist ideas), which, when it appeared in
Russia in 1844, was enthusiastically promoted by Belinsky. “The author,” he wrote, “wished to present to a depraved and egoistic society worshipping the golden calf the spectacle of the sufferings of wretched people . . . condemned by ignorance and poverty to vice and crime.”
²⁹

At the same time that he was reading Sue, Dostoevsky was also impressed, according to both Riesenkampf and Grigorovich, by Frédéric Soulié’s
Mémoires du diable
. Exploiting the tradition of Romantic satanism, Soulié combined it with a bitter social satire and wildly melodramatic intrigue. The aim of the book was to show that, under the Restoration and the July Monarchy, “virtue was normally persecuted and exploited, and vice, cunningly masked as virtue, was triumphant.”
³⁰
Dostoevsky was also interested in Émile Souvestre, who specialized in novels with parallel plot lines contrasting the fortunes of noble, self-sacrificing characters devoted to the welfare of humanity with those of cold, ambitious careerists who reach the highest rungs of the ladder in a depraved and unjust society. It is no surprise to see Dostoevsky working during the latter half of 1844 on a translation of George Sand’s
La dernière Aldini
: any work of Sand’s was an eminently marketable commodity. Here she exhibits the moral superiority of a true son of the people—the offspring of humble fisher-folk—to the spineless and decadent aristocracy of his native country. The book is filled with flashes of the revolutionary social Christianity now making its appearance in Sand’s incredibly voluminous production. “Liberalism,” proclaims the hero, “is a religion which should ennoble its followers, and, like Christianity in its early days, make the slave a freeman, the freeman a saint or a martyr.”
³¹
Dostoevsky no doubt toiled over such pages with reverence, but having almost completed the job, he discovered to his dismay that the work had already appeared in Russian.

Dostoevsky read widely in the numerous novels of George Sand and, as with the entire generation of the 1840s, such works greatly enriched his acquaintance with progressive and revolutionary ideas. In the moving obituary that he wrote forty years later, George Sand, he says, was more important in Russia than Dickens or Balzac because her readers “managed to extract even from novels everything against which [they] were being guarded.”
³²
The great satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin is even more explicit. “From the France of Saint-Simon, Cabet, Fourier, and Louis Blanc and, in particular, George Sand . . . flowed to us [in the 1840s] a faith in mankind; from there gleamed for us the certainty that the Golden Age was to be found not in the past but in the future.”
³³
George Sand had helped to
inspire such a faith in Belinsky, and the novelist whom Renan once called an Aeolian harp, resounding to all the ideological currents blowing in the tempestuous 1840s, also performed the same signal service for Dostoevky.