Dostoevsky (35 page)

Nothing further has been unearthed for certain about this Speshnev faction, although its existence was not a secret from the more penetrating observers who came to Petrashevsky’s. Years later, Dostoevsky gave some additional information to his friend and official biographer, Orest Miller. “For [Dostoevsky],” Miller writes, “the memory evidently remained that a conspiracy
in intent
had . . . existed for the future. The aim [of ‘the society for propaganda’] was to spread discontent with the existing order everywhere, beginning with the schools: to establish connections with everybody who was already discontented—with the religious dissidents (
raskolniki
) and the peasant serfs.”
¹²

Some further light on the organization is cast by an oath of allegiance found among Speshnev’s papers after his arrest. The signer pledged himself to obey the orders of the central committee whenever this executive body decided that the time for a revolution had arrived. He promised to take part in the battle at the appointed time and place; to come equipped with firearms, or cold steel, or both; and to fight “without sparing himself” for the success of the cause.
¹³
The dossier about Speshnev compiled in 1849 for the investigating commission has unfortunately been lost, and what we know about him comes largely at second-hand through the testimony of others and the summary of his case made for Nicholas I. Of all the Petrashevtsy arrested, only Speshnev was threatened with the use of more severe methods of extracting information. Under the threat, Speshnev disclosed the existence of the smaller group that had grown out of the Petrashevsky Fridays, and also the secret conversations with Chernosvitov and Mombelli. These new leads succeeded in throwing the commission off the scent of the secret society, but the oath gives us a lurid glimpse into the kind of society
that Speshnev would have formed, and allows us to imagine some of the atmosphere of its deliberations.

Dr. Yanovsky, whom Dostoevsky had refused even to take to Petrashevsky’s, became aware of a notable change in the character of his friend between the end of 1848 and the time of his arrest three months later. “He became somewhat melancholy, more irritable, more touchy, ready to quarrel over the merest trifle, and very often complained of giddiness.”
¹⁴
Yanovsky reassured his patient that there was no organic cause for these symptoms, and predicted that his gloomy state of mind would probably soon pass away. To which Dostoevsky replied, “ ‘No, it will not, and it will torture me for a long time. For I have taken money from Speshnev’ (he named a sum of about five hundred rubles) ‘and now I am
with him
and
his
. I’ll never be able to pay back such a sum, yes, and he wouldn’t take the money back; that’s the kind of man he is.’ ” And Dostoevsky repeated several times, so that the sentence engraved itself in Yanovsky’s memory: “Do you understand, from now on I have a Mephistopheles of my own!”
¹⁵

Long before his nightime conversation with Maikov, Dostoevsky had been continually anxious over the perils of his Petrashevsky involvement; and he became increasingly perturbed about the unknowns who crowded into Petrashevsky’s flat week after week. Haunted by the possibility of betrayal and arrest even for assisting at these relatively innocent Petrashevsky gatherings tolerated by the authorities, how much more would he have been agitated, how much more a prey to extreme fluctuations of emotion, because of his relations with the Speshnev group! He later told his second wife that, if not for the providential accident of his arrest, he would certainly have gone mad.
¹⁶

The sudden increase in the size of the Petrashevsky Fridays led to the formation of several satellite groups organized to take account of differing interests. Beginning in March 1848, some members decided to hold regular meetings, usually on Saturday, in the spacious apartment shared by Alexander Palm and Sergey Durov. The first was a lieutenant of the Life Guards, who also contributed to literary journals; the second was a freelance writer and translator. After his arrest, Dostoevsky told the authorities, with seeming ingenuousness, that the Palm-Durov Circle arose out of a plan to publish a literary almanac, which required all the literati to meet often for discussion.
¹⁷

Much of what went on in the Palm-Durov Circle is still obscure. Some facts,
however, are indisputable. The circle included all the members of Speshnev’s secret society (there is some doubt about Milyutin). The Speshnevites, as will appear, tried to mobilize the circle for the purposes of reproducing and distributing revolutionary propaganda (the plan outlined by Dostoevsky during his midnight visit to Maikov), but they never succeeded in doing so. Sometime toward the end of March, Pavel Filippov, a Speshnevite, suggested that it was time for the members of the circle to share their social-political ideas with others. He proposed that “they undertake, as a united effort, the composition of articles in a spirit of liberalism [i.e., “revolutionary”].” It was necessary, Filippov explained, to strip bare “all the injustice of the laws . . . [and] all the corruption and deficiencies in the organization of our administration.”
¹⁸
The articles on juridical and administrative issues could be reproduced on a home lithograph and distributed.

This proposal, enthusiastically supported by Grigoryev, Mombelli, and Speshnev, seems to have been accepted. Topics were taken by each of the members of the circle. None of the promised articles were forthcoming, but several manuscripts did appear that seemed suitable for propaganda purposes, and the question of the lithograph was debated in connection with their reproduction and distribution. The first manuscript of this kind to surface was written by Grigoryev, a lieutenant in the horse grenadiers and a member of the Speshnev secret society. Called “A Soldier’s Conversation,” this sketch concerns a peasant shipped off to the army as punishment for attacking a landowner who had abused his sister. A soldier in 1812, he speaks wonderingly of what he had seen in France, where the people had thrown out a king and “now they do not want tsars and run things for themselves, just like we do in the villages.”
¹⁹
An early example of agit-prop literature, the sketch is full of pseudo-naïve social protest, couched in terms that peasants would presumably understand and calculated to appeal to their mentality and values. Mikhail Dostoevsky advised Grigoryev to destroy it, but others urged him to make it even more forceful. The only copy of the work unearthed by the investigating commission was found among Speshnev’s papers, and by Grigoryev’s account, Speshnev had asked his permission to read “A Soldier’s Conversation” “practically in the public street.”
²⁰

A manuscript by Filippov is of the same character: a new, revolutionary version of the Ten Commandments, written in a combination of Church Slavonic and modern Russian. Each commandment is interpreted in a manner to persuade the reader that a revolt against oppression and social injustice is in conformity with the will of God. The authorities were particularly disturbed by Filippov’s comments on the sixth commandment, which “said that if peasants kill
their master, they are obeying the will of God; that whoever goes to war is sinful, and the tsar in particular sins when he leads his people to commit murder.”
²¹
Such material could only have been intended for circulation among the peasantry, and particularly, perhaps, the
raskolniki
. Dostoevsky was surely aware of its existence and may well have taken a hand in its composition.

There is still another work that the members of the Palm-Durov Circle spoke about reproducing and distributing. Pleshcheev told a group of students at the University of Moscow that “it is necessary to stir up self-consciousness in the people, and that the best means to do this would be to translate foreign works into Russian, adapting them to the speech-style of the simple people and distributing them in manuscript. And who knows, maybe some way will be found to print them. A society in Petersburg had been formed for this purpose, and . . . if we [the students] wished to cooperate with it we could begin with Lamennais’s
Paroles d’un croyant
.”
²²
Lamennais’s work is a powerful “new Christian” attack on social injustice, and Milyukov had promised to send a copy of his translation to Moscow. Milyukov used a stately Church Slavonic for his rendering and gave it a homespun Russian title—
The New Revelations of the Metropolitan Antonio
. The work that Harold Laski once called “a lyrical version of the
Communist Manifesto
”
²³
was felt to be well suited to stir up the latent dissatisfactions of the Russian peasant by its appeal to the egalitarian roots of primitive Christianity. Milyukov’s translation was read at a meeting of the Palm-Durov Circle in early April.

Over the course of several weeks of discussions, however, the initial excitement over the articles gave way to second thoughts. Opposition came to the fore and was voiced most vigorously by Mikhail Dostoevsky. It is remarkable that, under arrest during the long months of investigation, Dostoevsky never states anywhere that
he personally disapproved of Filippov’s idea
to print and distribute revolutionary propaganda. Instead, he reports on the disapproval of others—particularly his brother—and then associates himself with this disapproval
so that the entire Palm-Durov circle should not break up entirely
: “my brother told me that he would no longer go to Durov’s if Filippov did not withdraw his proposal. . . . I noticed . . . that many would act in the same way as my brother. . . . Finally, when we met the next time, I asked for the floor and talked them all out of it, assuming a tone of light mockery and sparing as much as possible everyone’s susceptibilities.”
²⁴

If we assume that the plan for the lithograph sprang from the attempt of the Speshnev secret society to manipulate the Palm-Durov Circle, whose literary-musical
character it was using as a screen for its activities, then Dostoevsky’s testimony and behavior take on a distinct meaning. When the Speshnevites became aware that the Palm-Durov Circle might dissolve entirely, Dostoevsky was assigned (or took on himself) the job of smoothing matters over so that the circle could continue to be used as a cover. The investigating commission distinguished sharply between the two brothers. Mikhail was freed two months after the investigation began, and was indemnified for his loss of income (though other radicals were indignant at the miserliness of the sum awarded).
²⁵

Despite Dostoevsky’s effort to calm the agitation, the Filippov proposal marked a turning point in the history of the Palm-Durov Circle. Both hosts became increasingly uneasy about continuing the gatherings, and when Durov asked impatiently if they could not be held elsewhere, Mombelli, probably from an impulse to keep the circle together at all costs, suggested Speshnev’s. For the Palm-Durov Circle to have met at Speshnev’s, however, would have negated its usefulness to his secret society, and Speshnev refused. Two or three further meetings were held at the Palm-Durov apartment, but both men were anxious to terminate them. Just before the roundup of the Petrashevtsy on April 22, 1849, Palm wrote to all members canceling the next date, and Durov made sure not to be home that evening.

It was after the plan for a lithograph was defeated that, we may infer, the Speshnevites decided to act alone. Filippov, with funds provided by Speshnev, began to order the parts for a handpress in various establishments in Petersburg. The authorities learned about the handpress from both Filippov and Speshnev, each of whom tried to shield the other by taking the blame for the idea. Dostoevsky adroitly evaded the issue. “The question speaks of a
home printing press
. I never heard from anybody at Durov’s about
printing
; yes, or anywhere else. . . . Filippov suggested a
lithograph
.”
²⁶
Not finding any trace of the handpress, and unable to establish that others were involved in attempting to set it up, the commission made no further effort to pursue this line of inquiry. The existence of the Speshnev secret society was never discovered; and Dostoevsky later told Orest Miller that “many circumstances [of the case] completely slipped from view;
an entire conspiracy vanished
.”
²⁷