Dostoevsky (41 page)
Authors: Joseph Frank
Everything in his previous life is judged as he turns back to contemplate it from, as it were, the edge of eternity: “When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul—then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is
happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness!
Si jeunesse savait
[If youth only knew]! Now, in changing my life, I am reborn in a new form, Brother! I swear that I will not lose hope and will keep my soul and heart pure. I will be reborn for the better. That’s all my hope, all my consolation!”
67
“Life is life everywhere,” Dostoevsky reassures Mikhail, “life is in ourselves, not in the exterior. I shall have human beings around me [in Siberia], and to be a
man
among men and to remain one always, not to lose heart and not to give in no matter what misfortune may occur—that is what life is, that is its task, I have come to be aware of this. This idea has entered into my flesh and blood.”
68
Such words try to convey some of the blinding truth that Dostoevsky now understood for the first time—the truth that life itself is the greatest of all goods and blessings, and that man has the power to turn each moment into an “eternity of happiness.” Dostoevsky had always refused to accept the increasingly prevalent dismissal of individual moral obligation, but what had been only a theoretical preference now entered into “his flesh and blood”; it had become an “idea-feeling,” so deeply interwined with his emotions that no argument would ever be able to shake it in the future.
No passage in Dostoevsky’s letter is more poignant than his description of the morally purifying effects of what he believed would be his last moments on earth. “If anyone remembers me as nasty,” Dostoevsky tells Mikhail, “or if I quarreled with anybody, if I produced an unpleasant impression on anyone—ask them to forget, if you happen to meet them. There is no gall and no rancor in my soul; I should so much like at this moment to love and to embrace just someone from among those I knew. This is a consolation, I experienced it today, saying good-bye to those dear to me before death.”
69
If the values of expiation, forgiveness, and love were destined to take precedence over all others in Dostoevsky’s artistic universe, it was surely because he had encountered them as a truth responding to the most anguished predicament of his own life.
Indeed, it is Dostoevsky’s piercing sense of the awful fragility and transiency of human existence that will soon enable him to depict, with a powerful urgency unrivaled by any other modern writer, the unconditional and absolute Christian commandment of mutual, all-forgiving, and all-embracing love. For Dostoevsky’s morality is similar to what some theologians, speaking of the early Christians, have called an “interim ethics,” that is, an ethics whose uncompromising extremism springs from the lurking imminence of the Day of Judgment and the Final Reckoning: there is no time for anything but the last kiss of reconciliation because, quite literally, there
is
no “time.” The strength (as well as some of the
weakness) of Dostoevsky’s work may ultimately be traced to the stabbing acuity with which, above all, he wished to communicate the saving power of this eschatological core of the Christian faith.
70
On December 24, 1849, two days after the grisly pageant enacted in Semenovsky Square, Mikhail was informed that his brother would begin his long and hazardous journey to Siberia that very night. Mikhail hastened to convey the information to Alexander Milyukov, and both went to the fortress to say farewell. When Dostoevsky, accompanied by Durov, was ushered into the room where Mikhail and Milyukov were waiting, the latter was struck by Dostoevsky’s unshakable conviction of his ability to survive. “Looking at the farewell of the brothers Dostoevsky,” he observes, “everyone would have remarked that the one suffering the most was remaining in freedom in Petersburg, not the one who was just on the point of traveling to Siberian
katorga
. Tears rose in the eyes of the older brother, his lips trembled, but Feodor Mikhailovich remained calm and consoled him.”
71
“Stop, brother,” Dostoevsky said at one point, “you know me, I am not going to my grave, you are not accompanying my burial—and there are not wild beasts in
katorga
but people, perhaps better than I am, perhaps worthier than I am.”
72
Such words are the only documentation we have so far as Dosoevsky is concerned; but other evidence throws light on the question of what he, as well as the other Petrashevtsy, expected to encounter among the people with whom they would share their captivity. In the documents that Petrashevsky wrote for the Commission of Inquiry, we find the following remarkable and touching reverie:
Perhaps fate . . . will place me side by side with a hardened evildoer, who has ten murders on his soul. . . . Resting at a way station and dining on a piece of stale bread . . . we begin to talk—I tell him how, and for what reason, I suffered misfortune. . . . I tell him about Fourier . . . about the phalanstery—what and why things are that way there, and so forth. . . . I explain why people become evildoers . . . and he, sighing deeply, tells me about his life. . . . From his story I see that circumstances crushed much that was good in this man, a strong soul fell under the weight of misfortune. . . . Perhaps, at the end of the story, he will say: ‘Yes, if things were
arranged your way, if people lived like that, I would not be an evildoer’ . . . and I, if the weight of my shackles allows me, extend a hand to him—and I say—‘let’s be brothers’—and, breaking my piece of bread, I give it to him, saying: ‘I am not used to eating very much, you need it more, take it and eat.’ With this, a tear appears on his roughened cheek and . . . before me appears . . . not an evildoer, but my equal in misfortune, perhaps also in the beginning a person badly misunderstood. . . . The act of humanization is completed, and the evildoer no longer exists.
73
Such “philanthropic, Utopian dreams of Petrashevsky,” as a Soviet Russian critic has remarked, “expressed the general state of mind and convictions of the circle. And Dostoevsky . . . too, despite instinctive doubts and forebodings, must have imagined something similar.”
74
All the more so since Dostoevsky’s early writings had led to the rise of “sentimental Naturalism,” whose creations stressed the human worth hidden in the lives of the most downtrodden elements of society.
Dostoevsky’s farewell may thus be taken as a more laconic expression of the same roseate fantasies articulated by Petrashevsky, a reaffirmation of the philanthropic aspect of his moral-social conviction of the time. Nonetheless, in the suggestion that the convicts might even perhaps be “worthier” than himself, Dostoevsky was unconsciously speaking better than he knew. For what was uttered only as a consolatory possibility in 1849, and was surely not accepted literally either by Dostoevsky or by those he was attempting to reassure, would one day become the basis of a view of the Russian people that he would not hesitate to proclaim to the entire world.
1
Quoted in P. S. Schegolev, ed.,
Petrashevtsy
, 3 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1926–1928), 1: 127.
2
Ibid.
3
DVS
, 1: 193.
4
Ibid.
5
I. Pawlowski,
Russisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch
, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1974), 2: 1766.
6
A. M. Dostoevsky,
Vospominaniya
(Leningrad, 1930), 192–193.
7
Ibid., 196.
8
Ibid.
9
M. N. Gernet,
Istoriya tsarskoi tyurmy
, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1961), 2: 220.
10
A. M. Dostoevsky,
Vospominaniya
, 197.
11
Schlegolev,
Petrashevtsy
, 1: 149.
12
A. M. Dostoevsky,
Vospominaniya
, 197.
13
Schlegolev,
Petrashevtsy
, 1: 149.
14
N. F. Belchikov,
Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev
(Moscow, 1971), 244.
15
DVS
, 1: 191.
16
Schlegolev,
Petrashevtsy
, 1: 160–161.
17
Biografiya
, 106–107.
18
DVS
, 2: 199.
19
Pis’ma
, 4: 258–259; June 20, 1849.
20
Ibid., 1: 124; July 18, 1849.
21
Ibid., 126; August 27, 1849.
22
Ibid., 127; September 14, 1849.
23
P. V. Annenkov,
The Extraordinary Decade
, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 243.
24
Pis’ma
, 1: 124; July 18, 1849.
25
Ibid., 126; August 27, 1849.
26
Ibid., 178; March 24, 1856.
27
Belchikov,
Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev
, 98.
28
Ibid., 100.
29
Ibid., 101.
30
Ibid., 100.
31
Ibid., 101.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid. Annenkov writes of the 1840s: “Literature and our cultivated minds had long ago relinquished the notion of the people as a human entity ordained to live without rights of citizenship and to serve the interests of others only, but they had not relinquished the notion of the people as a brutish mass without any ideas and with never a thought in its head.” Annenkov,
Decade
, 134.
35
Belchikov,
Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev
, 105.
36
Ibid., 105–106.
37
Ibid., 106.
38
Ibid., 109.
39
Ibid., 111–112.
40
Ibid., 86.
41
Schlegolev,
Petrashevtsy
, 3: 164.
42
Belchikov,
Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev
, 176.
43
PSS
, 11: 189–190.
44
V. I. Semevsky, “Sledstvie i sud po delu Petrashevtsev,”
Russkie Zapiski
, 9–11 (1916), 11: 31.
45
Miller,
Biografiya
, 115.
46
DVS
, 1: 223.
47
Biografiya
, 117.
48
DVS
, 1: 226.
49
Ibid., 226–227.
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., 229.
53
Miller,
Biografiya
, 118.
54
DVS
, 1: 229.
55
DW
, 152.
56
F. N. Lvov, “Zapiska o dele Petrashevtsev,”
LN
63 (Moscow, 1956), 188.
57
Biografiya
, 119.
58
Lvov, “Zapiska,” 188.
59
DVS
, 1: 230.
60
Ibid., 231.
61
Pis’ma
, 1: 128; December 22, 1849.
62
Ibid., 130.
63
Ibid., 129.
64
Ibid., 131.
65
Anna Dostoevsky,
Reminiscences
, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 22.
66
Pis’ma
, 1: 129; December 22, 1849.
67
Ibid., 130–131.
68
Ibid., 129.
69
Ibid., 130.
70
The eschatological importance of the presumably brief “interim” between the First and Second Coming for the interpretation of the ethics of Jesus was brought into prominence by Albert Schweitzer in
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
. For a penetrating discussion of its thesis, see Reinhold Niebuhr,
The Nature and Destiny of Man
, 2 vols. in 1 (New York, 1955), 2: 47–52.
71
DVS
, 1: 191.
72
Ibid., 192.
73
V. R. Leikina, E. A. Korolchuk, and V. A. Desnitsky, eds.,
Delo Petrashevtsev
, 3 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1937–1951), 1: 84–85.
74
V. A. Tunimanov,
Tvorchestvo Dostoevskogo
, 1854–1862 (Leningrad, 1980), 149–150.