Dostoevsky (29 page)

During the span of Dostoevsky’s friendship with Belinsky, the critic was thus oscillating between a Feuerbachian “humanism” with moral-religious overtones and the acceptance of a more “rational” viewpoint shading toward mechanistic materialism and moral determinism. We should remember, however, that Belinsky had little use for intellectual consistency as such, and the quick portrait of Belinsky sketched by Dostoevsky in his two articles of 1873 coincides with the image that emerges from a study of all the other materials. “Valuing science, and realism above everything,” Dostoevsky writes in his second article, “at the same time he [Belinsky] understood more deeply than anyone else that reason, science, and realism alone could construct only an anthill and not a social ‘harmony’ within which it would be possible for mankind to live. He knew that, at the foundation of everything, were moral principles,”
¹⁴
and he knew that in attacking Christianity, which was based on the moral responsibility of the individual, he was not only undermining the foundations of the society he wished to destroy but also denying human liberty. But Belinsky also believed, in Dostoevsky’s view,
that Socialism would restore the freedom of the personality and raise it to hitherto undreamed-of heights.

It is this Utopian Socialist Belinsky (perhaps still intermittently a “new Christian”), passionately concerned with the freedom of the individual personality, who dominates in the second article, which includes the only direct public testimony that Dostoevsky ever gave about his participation in the Petrashevsky affair, which led to his imprisonment and Siberian exile, and the motives inspiring him. His aim was to convince his readers of the 1870s that radicals were not stirred to action by dishonorable motives: “the Socialism then . . . was regarded merely as a corrective to, and improvement of [Christianity]. . . . All these new ideas seemed in the highest degree holy and moral and, most important, universal, the future law for all mankind without exception. . . . By 1846 I had already been consecrated into all the
truth
of this ‘future regeneration of the world’ and into all the
holiness
of the future Communistic society by Belinsky.”
¹⁵

What is distorted here is simply Dostoevsky’s assertion that it was Belinsky who had indoctrinated
him
with such ideas. We know very well that Dostoevsky had become converted to this sort of moral-religious Socialism at least several years before he met Belinsky. As a novelist, though, Dostoevsky instinctively reached after dramatic concentration, and he cast his own life here in its most effective form. Belinsky, after all,
had
played the role assigned to him by Dostoevsky in
Russian culture
of the 1840s. Why confuse the reader with the insignificant details of his own personal history?

Dostoevsky’s strategy becomes clearer if we examine the first article—written a month or two earlier—in which he aimed to convince his readers that Socialism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible, notwithstanding the honorable and idealistic motives of its youthful adherents. He appeals to his own experience of the later phase of Belinsky to prove the point, and once again he dresses up his recollections to convey an impression that is not autobiographically accurate. For he implies that Belinsky had converted him to atheism, and to that
rejection
of Christian moral-religious values that usually accompanied such a conversion in the late 1840s. The polemical intent is clear: Socialism in Russia had been atheistic and anti-Christian from the start, and it was impossible to maintain any connection between it and Christian morality. “As a Socialist,” Dostoevsky writes, “[Belinsky] was duty bound to destroy the teachings of Christ, to call it a deceptive and ignorant philanthropy [
chelovekolyubie
], condemned by modern science and economic doctrines.”
¹⁶

The core of Dostoevsky’s portrait of Belinsky is concentrated in an argument between the young writer and the critic concerning the problem of the moral
responsibility of the individual (a fundamental Christian moral value) and hence the issue of free will. This issue was of such epochal importance for the later Dostoevsky that one might be inclined to think he had smuggled it back anachronistically into the 1840s. Valerian Maikov, however, attacked Belinsky on this very subject in the winter of 1846–1847, and his attack was launched from a Utopian Socialist position appealing to the figure of Jesus Christ as the great symbol of man’s moral freedom from material determination.

As Dostoevsky presents it, the dialogue begins with Belinsky’s denial that the suffering and oppressed lower classes had any personal moral responsibility for their actions. “ ‘But, do you know,’ he [Belinsky] screamed one evening (sometimes in a state of great excitement he used to scream), ‘do you know that it is impossible to charge man with sins, and to burden him with debts and turning the other cheek, when society is organized so vilely that man cannot help committing crimes, when he is economically pushed into crime, and that it is stupid and cruel to demand from men what, by the very laws of nature, they cannot accomplish even if they wanted to.’ ”
¹⁷
The Belinsky speaking here is no longer the old “humanist” who responded to the emotive appeal of Christian moral-religious values; this is the voice of the admirer of Littré, and perhaps also the reader of Max Stirner, who would see the moral will as helpless or nonexistent and the criminal acts of the oppressed only as a natural and legitimate expression of their “egoistic” needs.

The conversation turns to the personality of Christ; and it is revelatory of the time that no discussion of social problems could avoid taking a position about Christianity. Dostoevsky continues: “ ‘I’m really touched to look at him,’ said Belinsky, interrupting his furious exclamations, turning to his friend [also present] and pointing at me [Dostoevsky]. ‘Every time I mention Christ his face changes expression as if he were ready to start weeping. Yes, believe me, you naïve person’—he turned again to me abruptly—‘believe me that your Christ, if he were born in our day, would simply vanish in the face of contemporary science and of the contemporary movers of mankind.’ ”
¹⁸

If Dostoevsky’s face registered such extreme emotion, it was because Belinsky’s words about Christ were of a coarseness of which Belinsky was fully capable. “That man [Belinsky],” Dostoevsky writes in 1871 to Strakhov, “reviled Christ to me in the most obscene and abusive way.”
¹⁹
Moreover, Belinsky’s comments betray the manifest Left Hegelian influence of Strauss, who had attributed Christ’s charismatic powers to the fact that he lived in a pre-rational world. The reply to this Left Hegelian thrust is uttered by Belinsky’s unnamed friend and is appropriately Utopian Socialist: “ ‘Well, no: if Christ appeared now,
He would join the movement and would lead it . . . .’ ‘All right, all right,’ Belinsky agreed with surprising suddenness—‘He would, as you say, join the Socialists and follow them.’ ”
²⁰
Belinsky’s uncertainty on this crucial point reveals his own transitional state of mind, although at the end of 1846, Belinsky had not long to go before calling the Utopian Socialists “social and virtuous asses.”
²¹

Dostoevsky’s comment on the interchange leaves no doubt about the ideological crosscurrents that were really involved. “Those movers of mankind whom Christ was destined to join were the French: George Sand above all, the now totally forgotten Cabet, Pierre Leroux, and Proudhon, then only just having begun his career. . . . There was also a German before whom [Belinsky] bowed to with deference then—Feuerbach. Strauss was spoken of with reverence.”
²²
Christ would thus have, quite accurately, joined the movement of the preponderantly Utopian Socialist and moral-religious French; the Left Hegelian Germans that are mentioned had rejected all claims to the supernatural but had not rejected Christian moral values. Dostoevsky’s judicious phrasing leaves those like Stirner, who
had
rejected such values, out of the group that Belinsky believed “Christ was destined to join.” In fact, the argument on which he reports—the argument not only of Belinsky with Dostoevsky, but also of Belinsky with himself—was really being carried on between the two competing doctrines then disputing for the ideological mastery of the Left throughout the world.
²³

“In the last year of [Belinsky’s] life,” concludes Dostoevsky, “I no longer went to visit him. He had taken a dislike to me, but I was then passionately following all his teaching.”
²⁴
Just what Dostoevsky means by “all his teaching” is terribly vague. Is it the teaching of moral-religious Utopian Socialism? Is it the teaching of Belinsky’s insulting Left Hegelian tirade against Christ, and his denial of free will and responsibility because of the overwhelming weight of “the laws of nature”? Dostoevsky wants the reader (who was now inclined, after a decade’s infatuation with scientific materialism, to revere Christian moral values) to understand that he
was
converted to Belinsky’s atheism and materialism; but there is good reason to doubt this, and not only from Dostoevsky’s works of this time. Dostoevsky’s closest friends in the next several years refused to surrender the
moral-religious inspiration of Utopian Socialism and were critical of Belinsky and of his intellectual heirs who soon appeared on the literary scene.

The enormous importance of the encounter between the powerful critic and the young novelist is more symbolic than historical, more literary than literal. Dostoevsky’s verbal skirmishes with Belinsky were of crucial significance for him as the future novelist of the spiritual crises of the Russian intelligentsia, but they did not lead to any decisive change in his ideas and values. The force of Belinsky’s impact, though, no doubt explains why Dostoevsky was so determined to tidy up his biography and to give to life the artistic symmetry that, according to his final view of Russian culture, it should rightly have had. For if Belinsky had not really introduced Dostoevsky to Socialism, he
had
introduced him to
atheistic
Socialism—the only kind that the Dostoevsky of the 1870s believed to be intellectually honest and self-consistent.

The mechanical “scientific” materialism that Belinsky admired in Littré did succeed in becoming the philosophical dogma of the Russian Left for much of Dostoevsky’s life. And moral values were derived from a Utilitarian egoism that, if it stemmed more directly from Bentham than from Max Stirner, fully shared the latter’s supreme contempt for all sentimental humanitarianism. Dostoevsky thus had good reason to regard his disputes with Belinsky as having foreshadowed the later development of Russian social-political and cultural life, and his encounter with Belinsky certainly colored his own reaction to such changes. For his Christianity always retained the strongly altruistic and social-humanitarian cast of the 1840s, and it was always pitted against a “rationalism” that served to justify a totally amoral egoism.

There can be no question either that the religious theme of Dostoevsky’s great novels was profoundly affected by the challenge of Belinsky. Not that atheism, or doubts about the beneficence of God, first loomed on his mental and emotional horizon in 1845. It would be naïve to imagine that the little boy whose consciousness had been stirred by the book of Job, or the young man who had participated in Shidlovsky’s tormented soul searchings, should have needed Belinsky to introduce him to such matters; but it was Belinsky who first acquainted Dostoevsky with the new—and much more intellectually sophisticated—arguments of Strauss, Feuerbach, and probably Stirner. And though his religious faith ultimately emerged unshaken—even strengthened—from the encounter, these doctrines did present him with an acute spiritual dilemma. Traces of this inner crisis can certainly be found in the wrestlings of Dostoevsky’s own characters with the problems of faith and Christ.

Feuerbach had argued that God—and Christ—were merely fictions representing the alienated essence of mankind’s highest values. The task of mankind
was thus to reappropriate its own essence by reassuming the powers and prerogatives alienated to the divine. The Left Hegelians, to be sure, did not recommend this as a task for any particular individual to undertake—it was only mankind as a whole that could recoup this great human treasure, but Stirner comes very close to urging everyone immediately to embark on their own personal deification. The effect of all this on the young Dostoevsky is not difficult to foresee. Nobody has portrayed more brilliantly the tragic inner dialectic of this movement of
atheist
humanism, and if Dostoevsky had no effective answer to Belinsky in 1845, he amply made up for it later by the creation of his negative heroes. For when such characters reject God and Christ, they invariably engage in the impossible and self-destructive attempt to transcend the human condition, and to incarnate the Left Hegelian dream of replacing the God-man by the Man-god.
²⁵