Dostoevsky (54 page)

³⁴
Ibid.

³⁵
Ibid.

³⁶
Ibid., 178; March 24, 1856.

³⁷
Ibid., 184–185; April 13, 1856.

³⁸
Ibid., 183; April 13, 1856.

³⁹
Ibid., 187; May 23, 1856.

⁴⁰
W. E. Mosse,
Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia
(New York, 1962), 42.

⁴¹
Pis’ma
, 1: 188; May 23, 1856.

⁴²
Ibid., 189; July 14, 1856.

⁴³
Ibid., 190.

⁴⁴
Ibid., 191.

⁴⁵
Ibid., 189.

⁴⁶
Ibid., 192.

⁴⁷
Ibid., 198; November 9, 1856.

⁴⁸
Ibid., 197–198.

⁴⁹
Ibid., 198.

⁵⁰
Ibid., 1: 205–206; December 21, 1856.

⁵¹
Ibid., 2: 579–580; March 9, 1857.

⁵²
Ibid., 580.

⁵³
Ibid.

⁵⁴
Ibid.

⁵⁵
Ibid., 1: 228; November 30, 1857.

⁵⁶
Ibid., 253–255; September 22, 1859.

Thanks to the kindness of new friends like Wrangel and Yakushkin, who obligingly conveyed letters between Dostoevsky and his family and old circle of friends in Petersburg and Moscow, the novelist, though far removed from the centers of Russian social and cultural life, could still gain some sense of the ideas and tendencies now stirring the intelligentsia. The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 (news of which had barely managed to seep into the prison camp) had stirred all the latent patriotic ardor of Dostoevsky’s old friend Apollon Maikov, a progressive Westernizer, and his open letter, published in the
St. Petersburg Gazette
in 1854 as a cultural-political manifesto, records the upsurge of chauvinistic nationalism that swept over much of literate Russian society at the beginning of hostilities. In this open letter the critic urges writers, as Russians, to honor the “sacred feeling of love for the fatherland” and to “illuminate [in their work] that ideal of Russia which is perceptible to everybody.”
¹

“I have read your letter,” Dostoevsky responds approvingly in January 1856, “and have not understood the essential. I mean about patriotism, the Russian idea, the feeling of duty, national honor . . . my friend! . . . I have always shared exactly these same sentiments and convictions. . . . What is really new in this movement that you have seen come to birth and of which you speak as a new tendency?” “I entirely share your patriotic sentiments about the
moral
liberation of the Slavs,” he continues, “I agree with you that Europe and her mission will be realized by Russia. This has been clear to me for a long time.”
²
Dostoevsky asserts repeatedly that both he and Maikov have remained the same men on the level of “the heart,” whatever alterations may have taken place in the “ideas” they profess; and these assertions serve as a prelude to the important profession of faith that Dostoevsky makes and his disclosure of how he now interprets his past.

“Perhaps a little while ago,” writes Dostoevsky, “you were still troubled by the influx of French ideas into that class of society which thinks, feels, and studies. . . . But you will agree yourself that all right-thinking people, that is, those who gave the tone to everything, regarded French ideas from a scientific point
of view—no more, and remained Russian even while devoting themselves to the exceptional. In what do you see anything new?”
³
By “French ideas,” of course, Dostoevsky was referring to the radical and Utopian Socialist currents of the 1840s, which he denies had had the power to change the Russian character. Dostoevsky’s self-interpretation feeds into and anticipates his later creations: time and again he will show in his major characters the persistence of something he considers “Russian,” even in those who are most powerfully and corrosively affected by Western European ideas. For Dostoevsky was passionately persuaded (and he accepted his own experience as irrefutable evidence of its truth) that the instinctive sentiments and loyalties of Russians would always break through in some way, no matter how impenetrable might seem to be the overlay of Western European culture in the makeup of their personalities. Referring to his years in
katorga
, he adds: “I learned . . . that I had always been a Russian at heart. One may be mistaken in ideas, but it is impossible to be mistaken with one’s heart.”
⁴

To be a Russian, then, means to be united with other Russians by a bond that evokes a sense of mutual moral responsiveness; and this bond, stemming from the heart, goes deeper and is more primary than all the false ideas that may distort Russian vision or blunt Russian moral sensitivity. Many Dostoevsky characters, in a few years, will be caught precisely in such an inner struggle between their Russian heart and the evil, corrupting, and amoral power of non-Russian ideas. As Dostoevsky explores and contemplates his past for the benefit of Maikov, what emerges is the first faint outlines of the rational/irrational dichotomy so characteristic of his post-Siberian creations. And this dichotomy has already begun to take on many of the specific moral, psychological, and ideological connotations to which Dostoevsky will later give such brilliant expression.

Dostoevsky’s letter to Maikov is precious as a source for the analysis of his own personal and artistic evolution. But how much truth is there in his belief that the Russian intelligentsia as a whole had been only superficially affected by “French ideas”? So far as Dostoevsky himself is personally concerned, he had always lived in uneasy tension with the subversive impulses (inspired primarily by hatred of serfdom) that had led him into the ranks of a revolutionary conspiracy. With regard to the Russian Westernizers, whom Dostoevsky naturally tended to interpret by analogy with himself, the situation is much more complex. One has the impression that Dostoevsky believed them all, or at least a sizable portion of them, to have also rallied behind the tsarist regime during the war. And if this is what he
did
mean, then he was woefully mistaken. For not only the Westernizers
but the patriotic Slavophils as well had been appalled by the corruption, disorder, and incompetence revealed by the regime of Nicholas I in the Crimean struggle. The majority of the intelligentsia, of whatever political stripe, shared the feelings expressed in the diary of A. I. Koshelev, a relatively liberal Slavophil, who wrote that Russian defeats in the Crimean War “did not distress us too much because we were convinced that even the defeat of Russia would be more bearable and more useful than the condition in which it had found itself in recent years. The mood of society and even of the people, if in part unconscious, was of the same nature.”
⁵
Removed as he was from the centers of Russian social and cultural life, and living in a predominantly military milieu hostile to any independent thinking, Dostoevsky was evidently unaware of such subversive stirrings.

Still, if we look at Russian culture as a whole, we can see an evolution similar to Dostoevsky’s own taking place among the Russian Westernizers in the years covered precisely by his arrest and exile. This massive shift of Russian social-cultural attitudes may be dated from a famous article of Belinsky’s, published in 1847, in which he lauded the world-historical role of the Russian people, and Dostoevsky certainly had it in mind when assuring Maikov that the influence of French ideas on educated Russians had been only a momentary deviation from the true Russian path. During the 1850s, the most significant development in Russian thought was the gradual assimilation of Slavophil ideas by educated opinion as a whole, and the amalgamation of such ideas into a new synthesis with those of the former Westernizer party. Since the most important publications in which this synthesis had been worked out were all issued abroad, Dostoevsky could have had no knowledge of them in his Siberian banishment.

To a great extent, this new synthesis of ideas was devised and propagated by Alexander Herzen, who now occupied the dominating place in Russian culture formerly held by Belinsky in the 1840s. Herzen, who had gone to live in Europe in 1847, had been stirred by the intoxicating hopes of the French revolution of 1848, and had also been horrified at the pitiless repression of the French working-class uprising during the notorious June Days of 1848, when it was crushed by the National Guard at the orders of the bourgeois government of the new French Republic. Herzen poured all his anguish and his disgusted disillusionment with Western political ideals into his deeply moving
From the Other Shore
—a work that still retains its force as a profound meditation on the historical destiny of modern Western civilization. His conclusion was that Western Europe would never make the inevitable transition to the new Socialist millennium because the principles of private property, monarchical centralism (ultimately deriving from Roman Catholicism), and obedience to civic authority were too strongly
ingrained in the European character to permit a decisive break with the centuries-old past of its tradition.

From the Other Shore
is a piercing cry of despair, uttered by Herzen as he saw his old ideals as a Russian Westernizer shot to pieces in the fusillades marking the end of the 1848 uprisings all over the Continent. But in a series of important utterances in the next few years (in
The Russian People and Socialism
,
On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia
, and many other publications less well known), Herzen went from negation to affirmation, and what he now affirmed stood in the sharpest contrast to what he had formerly believed. For he prophesied that backward Russia, precisely because it had remained outside the main current of European social-historical development, was the chosen instrument of history to lead the world into the new Socialist era. Taking up some of the ideas of the Slavophils and uniting them with those of the Westernizers, Herzen produced a grandiose amalgam that inflamed the Russian imagination and decisively affected the course of Russian social-cultural thought throughout the remainder of the century.

“From the Slavophils,” writes Andrzej Walicki, “Herzen took over the view of the village commune as the embryonic stage of a new and higher form of society and the conviction that collectivism (which he called the ‘socialist element’ or even ‘communism’) was a national characteristic of the Russian people. . . . Like the Slavophils, Herzen valued the self-government principle of the communes and the unaffected spontaneity of relations between its members, which were not governed by contracts or codified laws. Finally, like the Slavophils, Herzen believed that the Orthodox faith in Russia was ‘more faithful to the teaching of the Gospels than Catholicism,’ that religious isolation had fortunately enabled the Russian people to . . . remain apart from the ‘sick’ civilization of Europe.”
⁶

When there were rumors of the coming conflict between Russia and Turkey in 1849, Herzen wrote to the Italian revolutionist Giuseppe Mazzini that Russia would probably succeed in taking Constantinople (he did not foresee the intervention of the Western powers) and that this conquest would be the signal for the future worldwide revolution. He imagined that the peasant soldiers of Nicholas’s army, once victory had been gained, would refuse to return home to serfdom. Calling instead on the other Slavs freed from the Turks to join them, they would lead a general Slav uprising, with Russia at the head of a new Slavic democratic and social federation. “For Russia is the Slavic world organized, the Slavic state. To her belongs the hegemony.”
⁷
Such words illustrate the convergence between Dostoevsky’s new convictions and the dominating trend of Russian culture at the time.

Herzen went to live in London in 1852, and established there the first Free
Russian Press in exile. In the next few years he began to issue his own writings, as well as to found a number of new publications. Among these was an almanac, issued at irregular intervals, called
The Polar Star
(
Polyarnaya Zvezda
, the title of a similar almanac once edited by the Decembrist poet Ryleev), and, most important, his famous weekly,
The Bell
(
Kolokol
). Herzen’s ideas, after a few years, began to receive the widest diffusion inside Russia, and
The Bell
was read everywhere (even, rumor had it, in the Imperial Palace itself), despite being banned from the country and available only in copies smuggled across the frontier. By the late 1850s and early 1860s, the basic tenets of Herzen’s “Russian Socialism”—with its strong overtones of messianic nationalism and its positive reevaluation of peasant life and institutions—had become the general ideology of the Russian Left, despite the increasingly vehement quarrels over how they should be applied to the existing Russian social-political situation.