Dostoevsky (195 page)

Whatever the state of his physical health, and perhaps because he knew that his days were numbered, Dostoevsky felt it imperative to speak out in defense of his ideas that were now under attack by both liberals and radicals. Many entries in the notebooks rebut K. D. Kavelin, an important liberal Westernizer and university professor who had been tutored by Belinsky as a young student. Kavelin had attacked Dostoevsky’s belief that personal and moral betterment could
provide the basis for an improved (indeed, for an “ideal”) society. Society, he argued, could be changed for the better only by social-political action, not by that Christian self-perfecting of individuals advocated by Dostoevsky as an infallible remedy for Russia’s social ills.

Dostoevsky’s notes reaffirm, in the very last month of his life, one of the basic beliefs that had sustained him ever since emerging from the Siberian prison camp in 1854. At that time, he had written the famous letter declaring that, “if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that
in reality
, the truth were outside of Christ, then I would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”
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The same type of choice is posed more than twenty years later with reference to the Christian commandment of selfless love: “Turn the other cheek, love more than yourself, not because it is useful, but because it is pleasing, to the point of a burning feeling, to the point of passion. Christ made mistakes—it has been proven! This burning feeling says: It is better for me to stay with a mistake, with Christ, rather than with you” (27: 57). Another passage recasts the idea of the
extreme
nature of the demands made by Christ on the human personality and stresses its opposition to Utilitarian reasoning. “All of Christ’s ideas,” he writes, “can be debated by the human mind and seem impossible to fulfill. To turn the other cheek, to love more than yourself. For goodness sake, now why should that be? I am here for an instant, there is no immortality, I will live in my [obscenity]” (27: 56).

Kavelin’s tone of lofty professorial self-assurance also provoked Dostoevsky to an extremely rare outburst of self-praise. “The Inquisitor and the chapter about children,” he confides to his notebook. “In view of these chapters, you [Kavelin] could regard me from a scientific point of view; but not so arrogantly when it concerns philosophy, although philosophy is not my specialty. Even in Europe, such a force of atheistic
expression
does not exist,
nor did it ever
. Therefore, it is not like a child that I believe in Christ and profess faith in him, but rather, my
hosanna
has come through the great
crucible of doubt
, as the devil says in that same novel of mine” (27: 86). Kavelin’s criticisms prompted Dostoevsky to probe and clarify his own convictions carefully, and it is unfortunate that his response remains only fragmentary.

Another note returns to the same point. “The scoundrels [his critics] provoke me with
an ignorant
and retrograde faith in God. These asses could not even dream of such a powerful negation of God as is depicted in the Inquisitor and in the preceding chapter, to which the entire novel serves as an answer. It is not like a fool or a fanatic that I believe in God. And they want to teach me, and sneer at my backwardness. Yes, their stupidity could not dream of as strong a negation as I went through. They teach me! . . . Ivan Feodorovich is profound,
not one of the contemporary atheists, who demonstrate in their disbelief only the paltriest narrowness of their stupid abilities” (27: 48).

On December 3, Dostoevsky replied to a letter that Ivan Aksakov had sent a month earlier. “The main reason for the delay,” he writes, is “my very bad health . . . my emphysema has worsened.”
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The letter is devoted to the cultural-ideological issues that were in the forefront for both Dostoevsky and his correspondent, and Dostoevsky now expresses an unqualified hostility to the historical legacy of Peter the Great. He finds that Aksakov, having written that Peter “moved us into Europe and gave us European civilization,” had not sufficiently stressed the unhappy consequences of this presumably beneficial feat. Peter’s reforms, Dostoevsky insists, had divided Russian society into layers—“the authorities, the enserfed masses, and the city dwellers, with fourteen classes among them. That’s Peter’s work. Liberate the people and it would seem that Peter’s work was undone. But the belt, the zone between the authorities and the masses won’t retreat for anything and won’t give up its privilege of ruling the broad masses.” The social transformation, begun with the liberation of the serfs, had ground to a halt, and Aksakov should have made clear that as a result of the European civilization imported by Peter, “what in fact lies between the authorities and the people like a fatal belt [is] made up of the ‘best people’ from the fourteen classes.”
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His notes at this time echo the same antagonism to Peter the Great. One reads, “Nihilism appeared in our country because we are
all Nihilists
. . . . (All are Feodor Pavloviches right down to the last man.)” Dostoevsky ridicules “the wise men” who wonder where the Nihilists came from: “No, . . . we are not Nihilists, we simply want to save Russia by rejecting her (i.e., form
a layer
of aristocrats above the people, raising the people up to our own nothingness)” (27: 54). In the only issue of the
Diary
that Dostoevsky was able to complete before his death, he proposes that this “fatal belt” be swept away entirely.

By December 9, the two-volume edition of
The Brothers Karamazov
was ready. Dostoevsky began to distribute gift copies among his friends and family, and one was sent to Pobedonostsev, who advised him to present the book in person to Tsarevich Alexander. The heir to the throne and his consort, Marya Feodorovna, received him a week later at the Anichkov Palace. The only account of this presentation was left by Lyubov Dostoevskaya, then still a child, who probably relays what her mother had been told by Pobedonostsev. Her father behaved in
the presence of royalty exactly “as he was accustomed to behave in the salons of his friends. He spoke first, rose when he found that the conversation had gone on sufficiently long, and, taking leave of the Tsarevich and his wife, quitted the room as he had always done, turning his back” to his hosts. The tsarevich reportedly “was not offended by this, and later spoke of my father with esteem.”
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An informative account of Dostoevsky at this time has been left by Dimitry Merezhkovsky, one of the most important Russian novelists and critics of the twentieth century (his two-volume study,
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
, did much to shape later critical opinion about both writers). The fifteen-year-old Merezhkovsky had begun to write poetry, and his father seized the opportunity to obtain a professional opinion about his son’s adolescent scribblings after meeting Dostoevsky by chance in the salon of Countess Sofya Tolstaya. “I remember,” Merezhkovsky wrote in an autobiographical fragment, “the diminutive apartment in Kuznechny Alley with its low ceiling and cramped living room, piled with copies of
The Brothers Karamazov
, and the study, almost as narrow, in which Feodor Mikhailovich sat over galleys. Blushing, turning pale, stuttering, I read my childish, paltry verses. He listened silently, with impatient annoyance. We must have been disturbing him. ‘Weak, bad, worth nothing,’ he said at last. ‘In order to write well, one must suffer, suffer!’ ‘No,’ said my father, ‘let him not write any better, only let him not suffer.’ I recall the pellucid and penetrating look of the pale blue eyes when Dostoevsky shook my hand. I never saw him again, and then very shortly learned that he had died.”
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On December 27, Dostoevsky wrote a note to Countess Anna Komarovskaya, accepting her invitation to come to the Winter Palace at five on the afternoon of December 30. This titled lady was a member of the intimate court circle with which he had become acquainted, and at her request he read from his works for the guests she had assembled. Among them was Countess Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya, a distant relative of the novelist, who had spent her life as lady-in-waiting to one or another grand duchess but whose cultivation and intelligence were valued so highly by Tolstoy that she became one of his epistolary confidantes. Dostoevsky was eager to meet and speak with her about the enigmatic sage of Yasnaya Polyana, and she, on whom
Crime and Punishment
had produced an ineffaceable impression (“no other novel had ever stirred me so strongly”), had been impatient to make his acquaintance. Once the introduction was over, he immediately posed a question about Tolstoy, in whom, the countess notes, he took “a passionate interest.” “Can you explain his new tendency?” he asked. The countess admitted that it was “mysterious” to her as well,
but she promised to produce Tolstoy’s letter, where he spoke about all this—on the condition that he come to visit her for its transmission.
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He set January 11 as the date, and we shall abandon chronology a bit to round out this episode. “This enchanting and unique evening has remained fixed in my memory forever,” the countess continues. “I heard Dostoevsky with reverence: he spoke, like a true Christian, about the fate of Russia and the whole world; his eyes burned, and I felt in him a prophet.” The countess, a devout Christian, had broken into tears when her cousin Lev had announced to her in 1878 that he no longer accepted the divinity of Christ or regarded him as the Saviour, and the letter she read to Dostoevsky contained many of the same sentiments. “I can see Dostoevsky before me now, as he clutched his head and in a despairing voice repeated: ‘Not that! Not that!’ He did not sympathize with a single thought of Lev Nikolaevich; despite which he gathered up all the writing lying on the table: the original and the copy of Lev’s letter. From some of his words I concluded that the desire was stirring within him to dispute the false ideas of Lev Nikolaevich.”
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Countess Tolstaya’s intuition was quite accurate, and although he did not live to carry out this intention, his last notebook contains the entry: “To what extent man has
worshipped
himself (Lev Tolstoy)” (27: 43).

The new year 1881 found Dostoevsky in a buoyant mood, despite the occasionally gloomy predictions in his letters and conversations. To Grigorovich, sometime in the early part of January, he said that he doubted whether he would live out the winter months,
¹⁰
but Anna wrote that “in the first half of January Feodor Mikhailovich was in excellent spirits. He frequented his friends, and even agreed to take part in some private theatrics that the Countess S. A. Tolstaya intended to stage. He wished to play the part of the ascetic recluse in the play
The Death of Ivan the Terrible
by A. K. Tolstoy, the countess’s deceased husband.”
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His emotions probably wavered constantly, depending on his mood; and since he understood so well the importance of hope in resisting despair, he would have struggled against the occasional onslaughts of dejection brought on by his increasingly physical debility.

One catches a glimpse of Dostoevsky in the memoirs of his former proofreader, Varvara Timofeyeva, on which we have already drawn so extensively. When she passed him in the street at the beginning of 1881, he failed to recognize her, and she was too timid to approach him; but her words indicate the change of sentiment about him on the part of her generation. “I so much wished
to go to him, hear his voice again, tell him
how deeply
I now understood him, and how much that was good he had brought to me. . . . I felt myself to be his disciple, indebted to him for my moral world, my spiritual freedom.”
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Such emotions were not the result only of personal acquaintance, as can be seen from the memoirs of a writer now fallen into oblivion, A. V. Kruglov. “I was walking along the Nevsky Prospect with a medical student. Dostoevsky happened to come past us in a carriage. The medical student quickly, before I could do so myself, raised his hat. ‘Do you perhaps know Dostoevsky?’ I asked. ‘No, but what does that matter? I did not bow to him, but bared my head as I did in Moscow when I walked past the statue of Pushkin.’ ”
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