Dostoevsky (36 page)

Petrashevsky had perhaps gotten wind of the plan for propaganda being discussed among the Palm-Durov Circle. This may explain why, at the April 1
meeting of the Petrashevsky Circle, he launched a full-scale attack against the hotheads dreaming of a putsch. Outlining three problems as being of paramount social-political importance—the abolition of censorship, the reform of the judicial system, and the liberation of the serfs—Petrashevsky argued that the reform of the judicial system should be ranked as the first and most pressing goal. A reform of the courts so as to ensure public hearings and trial by jury would have a happy effect on the destinies of sixty million people, and it stood the best chance of being implemented.

The fiery twenty-year-old Golovinsky, whom Dostoevsky had brought along that evening for a first visit to Petrashevsky’s, bounded to his feet and launched into a passionate refutation. Even the police spy Antonelli was impressed: “Golovinsky spoke with heat, with conviction, with genuine eloquence, and it was evident that his words came straight from the heart.” He said that “it was sinful and a shame against humanity to look on indifferently at the sufferings of twelve million unhappy souls. . . . they . . . were striving for freedom themselves in every way.”
²⁸
It was impossible for the government to liberate the serfs, Golovinsky maintained, without stirring up opposition in one or another class, and without thus acting against its own political stability. The liberation of the serfs could only come “from below.”

Profiting from Golovinsky’s tirade, Petrashevsky took the floor to argue that the liberation of the serfs would probably lead to a class conflict that might result in a military or a clerical despotism. “To bring about the improvement of the judicial system,” Petrashevsky concluded, “was much less dangerous and more realizable.”
²⁹
Golovinsky, replying to Petrashevsky’s remark about class war, observed that a dictatorship would probably be necessary during the period of transition. Outraged at talk of dictatorship, and a declared admirer of the republican institutions of the United States, Petrashevsky retorted that he would be the first to raise his hand against any dictator.

This heated exchange brought into the open the conflict between the activists around Speshnev and the Fourierists or moderates for whom Petrashevsky spoke. In general, the activities of Dostoevsky and his friends (whether or not known to be members of the Speshnev society) were dedicated to radicalizing the sluggish Petrashevsky meetings and stirring their members to address themselves to the immediate revolutionary issue: the liberation of the serfs. The exchange also uncovers some of the agitated atmosphere and extreme political conclusions being drawn in Dostoevsky’s immediate circle. Political democracy was a secondary consideration in their ideology, and they contemplated the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship—no doubt exercised by a body similar to Speshnev’s
secret central committee—without repugnance. Where Dostoevsky stood is perfectly clear: Antonelli records that he intervened to support Golovinsky.

Two weeks later, the same argument was resumed during the famous session of the Petrashevsky Circle at which Dostoevsky read Belinsky’s
Letter to Gogol
, which he had already read twice at the Palm-Durov apartment. Dostoevsky could not have found a more propitious moment to introduce the weight of Belinsky’s
Letter
in the controversy already raging over tactics. Belinsky’s epistle, written in the summer of 1847 as an answer to Gogol’s
Selected Passages
(more accurately, as an answer to a letter of Gogol’s about Belinsky’s unfavorable reaction to the book), is the most powerful indictment against serfdom ever penned in Russian, and Dostoevsky and his friends used it effectively to reinforce their argument that serfdom was too morally intolerable to be endured a moment longer.

Dostoevsky read two of Gogol’s letters, as well as Belinsky’s text, and the effect of his rendition, as described by Antonelli, was sensational. “This letter [of Belinsky] produced a general uproar of approval. Yastrzhemsky shouted, at all the passages that struck him: ‘That’s it! That’s it!’ Balosoglo went into hysterics, and in a word, the whole group was electrified.”
³⁰
Dostoevsky then took the copies back and asked Filippov “to keep [the matter] a secret.”
³¹
Dostoevsky also passed the text to Mombelli, who, with incredible rashness, gave it to his regimental scribe and asked him to make several more copies. This evidence that Dostoevsky was actively circulating and propagandizing Belinsky’s
Letter
weighed heavily against him.

Gogol’s
Selected Passages
is a curious book that continues to baffle and irritate admirers of his work. Here the erstwhile pitiless satirist of Russian life displays his conversion to a religious pietism that, if it remains aware of social injustice, nonetheless sees the only remedy in the inner striving of each Christian soul for moral self-improvement and self-perfection. The work was an abrupt slap in the face for all those who believed (as did many Slavophils, not to mention the progressive Westernizers) that serfdom was incompatible with genuine Christianity. Belinsky was outraged by the book, not only because of its possible social repercussions but also as a personal insult—a betrayal of everything he had fought for under the banner of Gogol’s name. He could not, of course, attack the book too violently in public print; but when he received a private letter from Gogol expressing surprise at his unfavorable reaction, his anger burst forth in a raging flood of invective. Herzen called this white-hot torrent of words Belinsky’s last “testament,” and even Lenin, in the late nineteenth century, admired the fiery ardor of its indignation.
³²

Despite its reputation as a revolutionary manifesto, however, Belinsky’s
Letter to Gogol
is relatively moderate in its concrete demands. Moreover, Belinsky responds to Gogol in the accents of a Utopian Socialist new Christian, even though he had presumably by this time abandoned the “sentimental” values of this credo for a more “rational” ideology. “That you [Gogol] base your teaching on the Orthodox Church,” Belinsky writes, “I can understand: it has always served as the prop of the knout and the servant of despotism; but why have you mixed Christ up in this? What in common have you found between Him and any church, least of all the Orthodox Church? He was the first to bring the people the teaching of freedom, equality, and brotherhood and set the seal of truth to that teaching by Martyrdom.”
³³
Belinsky flatly contradicts Gogol’s assertion that “the Russian people are the most religious in the world” and calls them, on the contrary, “profoundly atheistic,” but he means only that their religion is one of superstition and ritual rather than of true inward faith. “Superstition” (the purely external and mechanical performance of religious ritual) is barbarous and backward, but Belinsky makes clear that genuine “religiousness” can well go hand-in-hand with progress and enlightenment.
³⁴

Nor is Belinsky’s
Letter
revolutionary in any Socialist sense at all; there is nothing in it calling for a fundamental transformation of society on new principles. It is a fervent democratic protest against despotism and serfdom that does not go beyond political liberalism in its demands. What Russia needs, Belinsky tells Gogol, “is not sermons (she has had enough of them!), or prayers (she has repeated them too often!), but the awakening in the people of a sense of their human dignity lost for so many centuries amid the dirt and the refuse; she needs rights and laws conforming not with the preaching of the Church but with common sense and justice. Instead of which she presents the dire spectacle of a country where men traffic in men, without even having the excuse so insidiously exploited by the American plantation owners who claim that the Negro is not a man.” Hence, for Belinsky, “the most vital national problems in Russia today are the abolition of serfdom and corporal punishment, and the strictest possible observance of at least those laws that already exist.”
³⁵
This is the “minimal program” that Belinsky advocated in the very last year of his life.

Even though placed at a disadvantage by the wave of excitement caused by Dostoevsky’s reading, Petrashevsky valiantly took the floor and tried to counter its heady effects. He argued once more that a change in the judicial system should take preeminence over all other issues. Antonelli summed up his reasoning: “a reform of the judicial system could be achieved in the most legal fashion, by demanding from the government those things it could not refuse, being
aware that they were just.”
³⁶
Golovinsky, taking a conciliatory line, pointed out that the liberation of the serfs might perhaps be obtained through the courts, particularly in the Western provinces; and he asked permission to pursue this topic at the next two meetings. “In general,” writes Antonelli with a flourish, “the meeting of the 15th, as the foreign newspapers express it, was
très orageuse
.”
³⁷

Thrones were toppling everywhere in Europe in 1848; new rights were being obtained, new liberties being clamored for. The arrest of Dostoevsky and the entire Petrashevsky Circle occurred as part of the tsar’s endeavor to suppress the slightest manifestation of independent thought that, sympathizing with the revolutions erupting elsewhere, might perhaps lead to similar convulsions closer to home. The last years of Nicholas’s reign froze Russian society into a terrified immobility, and whatever few traces of independent intellectual and cultural life had been allowed to exist earlier were simply wiped away. To take only one example, the new minister of education, Prince Shirinsky-Shakhmatov, eliminated the teaching of philosophy and metaphysics in the universities. “It drives one insane,” Granovsky wrote to a friend in 1850. “Good for Belinsky who died in time.”
³⁸

On April 22, the date of the last meeting at Petrashevsky’s, Dostoevsky spent the evening at Grigoryev’s, perhaps talking over plans with him and others for the operation of the handpress. At four in the morning he returned home and went to bed, but shortly thereafter was awakened by a faint metallic sound in the room. Opening his eyes sleepily, he saw standing before him the local police official, and a lieutenant-colonel dressed in the light blue uniform of an officer of the Third Section—the dreaded secret police. Told politely by the officer to rise and dress, he did so while his room was searched and his papers sealed. Finally, Dostoevsky was conducted to a waiting carriage, accompanied by the local police official, the officer, his frightened landlady, and her servant Ivan, who “looked around with an air of stupid solemnity appropriate to the occasion.”
³⁹
When Dostoevsky left the room and entered the carriage, he stepped out of the relatively normal life he had been living up to that time—with the exception of his brief apprenticeship as an underground conspirator—and into an extraordinary new and alien world.

This new world would strain Dostoevsky’s emotional and spiritual capacities to the utmost and immeasurably widen the range of his moral and psychological experience. What he had only read about previously in the most extravagant
creations of the Romantics would now become for him the very flesh and blood of his existence. He would know the chilling despair of solitude in prison; he would feel the desperate anguish of the hunted; he would live through the terrifying agony of the condemned clinging desperately to the last precious moment of life; he would sink to the lowest depths of society, live with outcasts and criminals, and listen to the talk of sadists and murderers for whom the very notion of morality was a farce; and he would have instants of sublime inner harmony, moments of fusion with the divine principle ruling the universe, in the ecstatic “aura” preceding an epileptic attack. When he returns to society again and begins to rediscover himself as a writer, the horizon of his creations will now be defined by this new world and its overwhelming revelations. And this will enable him to create works of incomparably more profound imaginative scope than had been possible in the 1840s, when his only approach to such a world had been through its Romantic stereotypes.

¹
P. S. Schegolev, ed.,
Petrashevtsy
, 3 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1926–1928), 1: 134.

²
Ibid., 75.

³
Ibid., 135.

⁴
Karl Marx,
Frühe Schriften
, ed. Hans-Joachim Lieber and Peter Furth, 2 vols. (Darmstadt, 1971), 1: 828.

⁵
V. I. Semevsky,
M. V. Butashevich–Petrashevsky i Petrashevtsy
(Moscow, 1922), 192.

⁶
V. I. Evgrafova, ed.,
Proizvedeniya Petrashevtsev
(Moscow, 1953), 496–497.

⁷
Schegolev,
Petrashevtsy
, 3: 60.

⁸
Semevsky,
Butashevich–Petrashevsky
, 194.

⁹
Schegolev,
Petrashevtsy
, 3: 63.