Authors: Joseph Frank
Whatever was said in this encounter may have been caused by Turgenev’s upset over the accounts of Dostoevsky’s speech in the newspapers, which had
reported on his participation in the general enthusiasm. The words of Aksakov about the Westernizer-Slavophil reconciliation accomplished by Dostoevsky also troubled him deeply. And since he had said nothing at the moment to disrupt the rapturous jubilation, he feared his silence might be taken as agreement. On June 11 he wrote to M. M. Stasyulevich, editor of the
European Messenger
, requesting that he include in an article about the Pushkin celebration a denial that “he [Turgenev] had been completely subjugated” by Dostoevsky’s speech and accepted it completely. “No, that’s not so,” Turgenev insisted. “It was a very clever, brilliant, and cunningly skillful speech, [and] while full of passion, its foundation was entirely false. But it was a falseness that was extremely appealing to Russian self-love.”
57
The next morning, while waiting for his train at the railroad station, Dostoevsky wrote the
Moscow News
requesting that his speech be printed “as soon as possible” and that the editors not make “any editorial corrections (that is, in sense and content).”
58
With that, he departed for home. In the next few months, the last remaining in his life, buoyed by the enthusiasm and the reverence he had encountered from the adoring crowds at the festival, he threw himself with renewed vigor into completing
The Brothers Karamazov
and then into reviving his
Diary of a Writer
.
1
PSS
, 26: 442.
2
Ibid., 30/Bk. 1: 153–154; May 5, 1880.
3
Ibid., 155–156; May 19, 1880.
4
Cited in Marcus C. Levitt,
Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880
(Ithaca, NY, 1989), 62. My account of the Pushkin celebration is greatly indebted to this excellent book.
5
PSS
, 30, Bk. 1: 158–159; May 25, 1880.
6
Ibid., 160–161; May 26, 1880.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid., 165; May 27, 1880.
9
Ibid., 169; May 28/29, 1880.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., 168; May 27/28, 1880.
12
Ibid., 165; May 27, 1880.
13
The quotations are from Levitt,
Russian Literary Politics
, 101.
14
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 168; May 27/28, 1880.
15
Ibid., 173–174; May 31, 1880.
16
Ibid., 175–176; June 2/3, 1880.
17
Ibid., 179; June 3/4, 1880.
18
Ibid., 177–179; June 3/4, 1880.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
21
DVS
, 2: 396.
22
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 180; June 5, 1880.
23
Ibid., 182; June 7, 1880.
24
Levitt,
Russian Literary Politics
, 83–85.
25
Ibid., 85.
26
Ibid., 86.
27
Letopis
,
zhizni i tvorchestvo F. M. Dostoevskogo
, ed. N. F. Budanova and G. M. Fridlender, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1995), 2: 429.
28
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 182; June 7, 1880.
29
Ibid.
30
PSSiP
, 15: 66.
31
Ibid., 68.
32
Ibid., 69.
33
Ibid., 69–70.
34
Ibid., 70.
35
Ibid., 73–74.
36
Ibid.
37
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 182; June 7, 1880.
38
Quoted in
PSSiP
, 15: 827.
39
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 183; June 7, 1880. See also ibid., 354.
40
Letopis
, 3: 430.
41
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 183; June 7, 1880.
42
Levitt,
Russian Literary Politics
, 122.
43
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 184; June 8, 1880.
44
DVS
, 2: 398.
45
An account is given in the commentary to the speech contained in
PSS
, 26: 445–451.
46
Dostoevsky is not so much citing Pushkin as rewriting him. In the poem, the elder of the Gypsy tribe simply says to Aleko after the murder: “
Ostav nac, gordy chelovek
” (“Leave us, proud man”). There is nothing about humbling oneself or toiling on thy native soil. A. S. Pushkin,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
, 6 vols. (Moscow, 1949), 2: 240.
47
The reference to Liza was followed by one to Natasha Rostov of
War and Peace
, but it was drowned out by the storm of applause for Liza. See
PSS
, 26: 496.
48
DVS
, 2: 418.
49
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 184–185; June 8, 1880.
50
DVS
, 2: 453.
51
PSS
, 26: 461.
52
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 185; June 8, 1880.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid., 358.
55
Anna Dostoevsky,
Reminiscences
, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 235.
56
Quoted in I. Volgin,
Posledny god Dostoevskogo
(Moscow, 1986), 300–301.
57
PSSiP
, 12/Bk. 2: 272.
58
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 186; June 10, 1880.
Back in Staraya Russa, Dostoevsky dispatched a letter to Countess Sofya Tolstaya, who, along with Vladimir Solovyev and the singer and composer Yulia Abaza, had signed a collective telegram congratulating him on his Pushkin success. He repeats in brief much of what we already know, including the glowing spontaneous responses of Turgenev and Annenkov (“the latter absolutely an
enemy
to me”), and adds an extra detail: “ ‘I’m not saying that because you praised my Liza,’ Turgenev told me.” Apologizing for “talking so much about myself,” Dostoevsky insists, “I swear it isn’t vanity: one lives for such moments, it’s for them that you in fact come into this world. My heart is full—how can I help telling my friends. I’m still stunned.”
1
As a veteran campaigner in the Russian social-cultural wars, Dostoevsky was under no illusions that he would emerge unscathed or that battle would not rapidly be joined. “Don’t worry—I’ll soon hear ‘the laughter of the crowd’ ” (a citation from Pushkin), he assures the countess. “I won’t be forgiven this in various literary dark alleys and tendencies.” From the summaries of his speech in the newspapers, he already saw that two of his main points were being overlooked. One is Pushkin’s “universal responsiveness,” which “comes completely from our national spirit.” Hence Pushkin “is in fact our most national poet.” The second point was that “I gave a formula, a word of reconciliation for all our parties, and showed the way out to a new era. That’s what everyone in fact felt, but the newspaper correspondents either didn’t understand that or refused to.”
2
He was convinced that he had been understood by the public, regardless of what the newspapers were saying or what the monthly journals would print in their next issues.
On June 15 Dostoevsky wrote to Yulia Abaza, responding to a story of hers on which she asked him to comment. Dostoevsky’s criticism furnishes him an occasion to release the anti-Semitic animus that now more and more dominated his thoughts. The idea of Abaza’s story, as Dostoevsky defines it, is “that races of people who have received their original idea from their founders, and
who subordinate themselves
to it exclusively over several generations, subsequently
must necessarily degenerate into something separate from humanity as a whole, and even, in the best conditions, into something inimical to humanity
as a whole
—that idea is true and profound.” Whether Abaza presented this idea as being embodied in the Jewish people is not clear, but Dostoevsky interprets Jewish history as an instance of this general law. “Such, for instance, are the Jews [
evrei
] beginning with Abraham, and continuing to the present when they have turned into Yids [
zhidy
]. Christ (besides the rest of his significance) was the correction of this idea, expanding into pan-humanness [
vsechelovechnost’
—a key term in the Pushkin speech]. But the Jews refused the correction and remained in all their former narrowness and inflexibility, and therefore instead of pan-humanness have turned into the enemies of humanity, denying everyone except themselves, and now really remain the bearers of the Antichrist and, of course, will be triumphant for a while.”
3
Dostoevsky had always claimed that neither he nor the Russian people nurtured any hostility toward the Jewish religion, but his previous identification of “Yiddism” with the materialism of the modern world had by now hardened into dogma. The Jews had become the agents of the Antichrist who would dominate the world for a time—as predicted in Dostoevsky’s favorite book of Revelation—before the world would be redeemed by the Russian Christ and the
vsechelovechnost’
of the Russian people. But meanwhile, the reign of darkness was at hand, and the Jews “are coming, they have filled all of Europe, everything selfish, everything inimical to humanity, all of mankind’s evil passions are for them—how could they not triumph, to the world’s ruination!”
4
Such a passage shows him at the very worst of his anti-Semitic animosity.
On July 6, a letter to Lyubimov accompanied the first chapters of Book 11 of
The Brothers Karamazov
, the completion being promised for the August issue. “The final twelfth book,” he writes, would be published in September, and then, “for the October issue there will follow . . . a short ‘Epilogue.’ ” Meanwhile, however, he has “been held up a bit by the publication of the
Diary
,” which now, besides his Pushkin speech, will include “a rather long foreword and, I think, an afterword, in which I want to say a few words in reply to my dear critics.”
5
The Russian press was filled with commentaries on Dostoevsky’s speech, as well as reprints of it in whole or in part.
“I undertook to read everything written about me and my Moscow speech in the newspapers,” Dostoevsky explains to Elena Shtakenshneider, “and I decided to reply to Gradovsky, that is, not so much to Gradovsky as to write our whole
profession de foi
[profession of faith] for all of Russia.” G. K. Gradovsky, a professor of civil law at the University of Moscow, had published a respectful but critical
article on Dostoevsky’s speech, entitled “Dreams and Reality,” in
Voice
. Dostoevsky probably chose Gradovsky’s article as the target of his reply because it was such a well-reasoned statement of the liberal Westernizing position, free from the acerbities of critics influenced by radical ideas. He felt it essential to take up the polemical cudgels because, as he told his correspondent, a positive attitude toward Russia had disturbed the Petersburg press and thus “has to be sullied, destroyed, distorted, and everyone has to be dissuaded: ultimately nothing new happened, they say, it was just the good humor of kindly hearts after Moscow dinners.” But something new
had
happened, in Dostoevsky’s view, and he considered the task of asserting it so important that he wrote his afterword about Gradovsky on his son’s birthday. “Guests came, and I sat to the side and finished up the work.”
6
His irate words hardly do justice to the temperate tone of Gradovsky’s article. Still, while praising Dostoevsky’s comprehension of Pushkin as a poet, Gradovsky refuses to accept the social-historical implications that are drawn from Pushkin’s work. Driven to a fury, Dostoevsky counterattacked with all the considerable rhetorical resources at his command. Written as an afterword to an explanatory introduction and the reprinting of his speech, Dostoevsky’s answer is indeed a
profession de foi
, a declaration of principles rather than an attempt to reason with his opponent so as to convince him to alter his ideas. “You and I will never come to an agreement,” he rightly says, “and so I have no intention whatsoever of trying to persuade or dissuade you.” Indeed, Dostoevsky asserts that he is not addressing himself to Gradovsky at all but rather to his own readers. “I hear, I sense, I even see the rise of new elements who are longing for a new word, who have grown weary of the old liberal snickering over any word of hope for Russia” (26: 149). His article contains a summary of his beliefs and convictions as they had already been expressed in the
Diary of a Writer
, but these ideas had previously been set down with reference to one or another topical subject. Here they are stated boldly and unequivocally, asserted in their own right, and often supported by the same autobiographical anecdotes already used to illustrate the personal roots of his convictions.
First he deals with Gradovsky’s charge that, if Russians wished to “enlighten” themselves, they must draw such “enlightenment” from Western European sources. But what does Gradovsky mean, Dostoevsky inquires, when he speaks of enlightenment? Does he mean “the sciences of the West, practical knowledge, trade, or spiritual enlightenment? If the first, then all such ideas could come from Europe, “and we truly have no way to escape them, and no reason to try.” But if he means “spiritual enlightenment that illuminates the soul, enlightens the heart, guides the mind, and shows it a path in life,” then Russians have no
need to appeal to Western European sources. “I maintain that our people were enlightened long ago, when they took Christ and His teachings as their very essence.” He then sketches, in vivid images, the endless sufferings endured by the Russian people throughout their history—years during which they had nothing but Christ to cling to as consolation. But he knows very well that “my words will seem childish babble” to those of Gradovsky’s persuasion, indeed, “almost indecent” (26: 150–151).