Dostoevsky (32 page)

8. M. V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky in 1840

Sometime in the early 1840s, Petrashevsky began to invite his immediate friends to drop in for conversation; and this was the nucleus of what became his “circle.” An indefatigable reader and book collector, he acquired a sizable library of “forbidden” books dealing with the most important historical, economic, and social-political issues of the day. Indeed, one of the greatest attractions at Petrashevsky’s was his extensive library, which he was only too eager to make accessible to others. By 1845 the circle had extended much beyond the bounds of Petrashevsky’s old schoolfellows, and he had become a well-known figure in Petersburg social life. Petrashevsky by now had dropped all of Fourier’s fantastic cosmology and natural history, nor did he share the religiosity either of Fourier or of his successor as the head of the movement, Victor Considérant. What impressed Petrashevsky in Fourierism was “the organization of the phalanstery.”
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He was persuaded that the establishment of such a Utopian dwelling, and the application of Fourier’s theory of human nature to the organization of its work, would transform human labor from a burden to a joyous, self-fulfilling activity.
Indeed, he was so convinced of the feasibility of Fourier’s Utopia that in 1847 he tried to realize it on his own small estate. Enlisting the support of his peasants, who obligingly agreed to all his proposals (or so he believed), he proceeded to build a fully equipped phalanstery for them. The great day arrived, the forty-odd peasant families left their miserable
izbas
for their new residence, but the next morning the ideal dwelling, with all its comforts and amenities, had been burned to the ground.

Far from disillusioning Petrashevsky, this episode only convinced him that a preparatory period of intellectual enlightenment was essential for social progress; and so he devoted himself even more fervently to spreading enlightenment everywhere he could, not only at his open-house “Fridays” but also at various clubs and organizations that he joined (such as a dancing class for tradesmen and shopkeepers) specifically to meet as many people as possible and spread the ferment of dissatisfaction.

Despite his wide range of acquaintances, Petrashevsky had no close friends. Always courteous with members of his circle, there was yet something grating about his personality that perhaps sprang from his self-appointed role as an intellectual
agent provocateur
. Dostoevsky, under questioning by the investigation commission after the mass roundup and arrest of the Petrashevsky Circle, denied any intimacy with him, but added, “To be sure, I always respected [him] as an honorable and noble human being.”
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Most of the visitors who came to Petrashevsky’s, moreover, could not help harboring mixed feelings about him because of his reputation as a capricious eccentric. There were endless anecdotes about his hassles with bureaucratic officials, whom he constantly provoked by insisting that they obey to the letter the prescriptions of the Russian legal code. Some of the stories about him derive simply from the striking individuality of his personal appearance. He was alleged to have gone to church dressed as a woman; on another occasion, having been ordered to cut his hair, he arrived at the office with luxuriant locks that turned out to be a wig! How many reports of this kind are apocryphal is impossible to say. But they all obviously derive from his mockery of the innumerable petty regulations governing every aspect of ordinary life in Russia and his stiff-necked and courageous refusal to submit to them tamely. The result was, nonetheless, that he acquired the reputation of being a jester rather than a person of sense and responsibility, and it was difficult even for most of the members of his circle to accept him without inner reservations.

This was the already notorious personality whom Dostoevsky began to visit in the spring of 1847. He went to Petrashevsky’s as he would have gone to any other social gathering. There was nothing secret or conspiratorial about Petrashevsky’s
Fridays any more than there had been about the reunions of the Belinsky Pléiade or the Beketov Circle. After all, people came together to talk a little more freely about the same matters that were being broached in the literary journals. It was generally believed that, as long as such conversation was carried on behind closed doors, there was nothing to fear from the government. A lively young Petersburger, in a letter dating from the beginning of 1848, lists among the attractions of the city “the sermons of Nilson, the propaganda of Petrashevsky, and the public lectures and feuilletons of Pleshcheev”
²³
—all seemed to him to exist on the same level of tolerated public diversion and expression of opinion. This belief, as we shall soon see, was mistaken.

By the late spring of 1848, with increasing membership that fluctuated from week to week, the meetings turned into a sort of debating club, and a small bell, with a handle suspiciously carved in the figure of a statue of liberty, was used to regulate the ebb and flow of talk. D. D. Akhsharumov, who later became a doctor and a pioneer in Russian social hygiene, writes that the gatherings were “an interesting kaleidoscope of the most diversified opinions about contemporary events, the decisions of the government, . . . contemporary literature . . . happenings in the city were brought up, everything was talked about at the top of one’s voice, without the slightest restraint. . . . Because of the . . . conversations touching primarily on social-political questions, these Petrashevsky evenings interested us enormously; they were the only ones of their kind in Petersburg. The gatherings usually continued far into the night, until two or three in the morning, and ended with a modest supper.”
²⁴

Dostoevsky did not frequent the Petrashevsky meetings assiduously during the first year and a half, and Yanovsky says that he spoke of the gatherings contemptuously, attributing their popularity both to the free refreshments and to a desire “to play at liberalism, because, you see, which of us mortals does not enjoy playing that game.”
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The Petrashevsky milieu could hardly have replaced either the Pléiade or the Beketov Circle in his affections. Both of these had been small groups bound together by ties of personal friendship and common aims, while Dostoevsky and Petrashevsky did not even get on well together. Dostoevsky would certainly have disliked Petrashevsky’s rampant Left Hegelian atheism as much as he had disliked that of Belinsky, and we can imagine him disliking it a good deal more. Belinsky’s tempestuous explosions were at least indicative of a genuine emotional concern for the dilemmas of religious faith, and the warmth and good-heartedness of his character, as well as his genius as a critic, no doubt
made up for a good deal. Petrashevsky was of an entirely different temperament and always spoke of religion with coldly hostile sarcasm or scornfully mocking irreverence. After Dostoevsky’s death, Nikolay Speshnev—about whom we shall soon be hearing a good deal—told Mme Dostoevsky that “Petrashevsky had produced a repulsive impression on [Dostoevsky] because he was an atheist and mocked at faith.”
²⁶

Like all of the intelligentsia, Dostoevsky was oppressed by the general lack of freedom in Russian social life; but the most insufferable injustice—the issue that stirred his deepest emotional responses—was the enslavement of the peasantry. On May 18, 1847, however, Nicholas I insisted, in a speech to a delegation of nobles, that peasants could not be considered “as private property, and even more as goods,”
²⁷
and he asked for the aid of the nobility in helping him to convert the status of the peasants from serfs to that of tenants. News of this pronouncement, spreading like wildfire through the capital, aroused the highest hopes; even Belinsky became convinced that Nicholas was at least determined to cut out the deadly cancer threatening the life of Russian society. There was, as a result, very little sense of political urgency in the talk at Petrashevsky’s before the fall of 1848. Articles were read and views exchanged on every conceivable subject; the advantages of one or another Socialist system were pondered and weighed; the rigors of the censorship were condemned; the malfeasance of various highly placed bureaucratic officials exposed. But the final effect must have been that sense of exasperated impotence that, we may assume, Dostoevsky could tolerate only in small and intermittent doses.

This atmosphere of stagnation was swept away by the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, which caused panic in Russian ruling circles and a wild excitement among the intelligentsia. The tsar himself, when the news arrived, was supposed to have erupted in the midst of a ball clutching at the telegraphic dispatch and ordered his dancing officers to saddle their horses. Herzen has left a picture of frenzied Petersburgers snatching the newspapers from each other’s hands at cafés until, finally, someone clambered on a table and read to all the others at the top of his voice. Alexander Milyukov conveys the rebellious mood that swept over the intelligentsia as the astonishing news kept pouring in from abroad. “From the first day of the February revolution, the most incredible events succeeded one another in Europe. The unheard-of reforms of Pius IX provoked uprisings in Milan, Venice, Naples; the surge of liberal ideas in Germany provoked revolutions in Berlin and Vienna. . . . The rotten foundations of the old reaction were falling, and a new life was beginning for all of Europe. But, at the same time, the most oppressive stagnation reigned in Russia; thought and
the press were confined more and more, and no activity appeared anywhere since social life had been crushed. . . . Practically with every mail delivery from abroad, we heard about new rights granted to the people, whether willingly or not, while in Russian society we heard only rumors of more limitations and constraints. Whoever remembers that period knows how all this worked on the minds of the youthful intelligentsia.”
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The first effect of this mutinous restlessness was to swell the ranks of the Petrashevtsy with an influx of new members. Never before had the gatherings been so well attended and so lively, and beginning in the fall of 1848 Dostoevsky began to show up at Petrashevsky’s Fridays with some regularity. In the back of everyone’s mind, of course, was the question of whether the Russian regime itself could indefinitely escape the fate that had overtaken the absolute monarchs of Europe, and the talk at Petrashevsky’s began to focus more directly on Russian social-political problems. All the more because, as Herzen noted, “all the rumors about the intention of the Tsar to declare the liberation of the peasants, which had become very widespread . . . instantly ceased.”
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It was at this time that the Petrashevsky gatherings were organized on a more formal basis, and a “president” was chosen each Friday to take charge of the animated arguments.

With the crisis atmosphere in the country brought on by the revolutions in Europe, it was inevitable that the meetings at Petrashevsky’s would arouse suspicion. His escapades had already called him to the notice of the secret police, and he had been placed under discreet observation in 1844. At the beginning of 1848 he incautiously circulated a petition among the St. Petersburg nobility calling for a revision of the law governing the sale of estates. The purpose of this proposal was to raise the value of such property by making it available to non-noble buyers, but such a buyer would be required to change the status of peasants, after purchase, from serf to tenant. Petrashevsky thought this a very clever maneuver to enlist the greed of the landowners on the side of the peasant emancipation. The only result, however, was to alert the authorities once again to his irritating, gadfly existence.

Deciding to investigate him more carefully, both the secret police and the Ministry of Internal Affairs placed Petrashevsky under secret surveillance. Agents of the ministry reported, after ten months, that meetings were taking place in his home every Friday lasting until three or four in the morning. “They [the guests] . . . read, spoke, and disputed; but what exactly they spoke about it was impossible to determine because of the caution and secrecy with which Petrashevsky surrounded himself.”
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Accordingly, a secret agent named Antonelli
turned up as a fellow employee of Petrashevsky at the ministry in January 1849. Antonelli furnished his superiors with regular reports of his conversations with the suspect; and though Petrashevsky was suspicious of his efforts to ingratiate himself, Antonelli was present at the last seven meetings of the circle between March 11 and April 22.