Dostoevsky (55 page)

Dostoevsky’s letter to Apollon Maikov thus provides us with a rewarding glimpse into that psychological-ideological matrix, still in its formative stage, out of which Dostoevsky’s future works would emerge, and it also reveals his literary plans. Dostoevsky confides to Maikov that he had thought out during his years in camp what he calls “my grand, definitive story.” But he had not begun to write it on his release because of his love affair with Marya Dimitrievna, “which distracted and absorbed me completely,” and instead had begun “a comic novel, but so far have only written individual adventures of which I have enough; now I am
sewing up the whole
.”
⁸
Whether these words refer to
Uncle’s Dream
or
The Village of Stepanchikovo
is not clear. In any case, Dostoevsky was convinced, as he wrote to Wrangel a few months later, that only a novel “will make me a name and attract attention to myself,”
⁹
but he was also persuaded that permission would not be given him to publish a work of fiction.

What he now pinned his hopes on, above all, was his
Letters on Art
, the work he intended to write (or had partially written) devoted to “the mission of Christianity in art”
¹⁰
and dedicated to the daughter of Nicholas I. Unfortunately, no trace of any such text has turned up among Dostoevsky’s papers, although his literary journalism of the early 1860s unquestionably reflects the ideas he was pondering over at this time—the relation of art to a transcendental or supernatural ideal. Continuing his efforts to prove his loyalty to the throne, Dostoevsky also wrote another poem, “On the Coronation and Conclusion of Peace”—an invocation of the blessings of God on the new tsar and savior of Russia—which he dispatched through General Gasfort to Wrangel.

At the exact moment that he was racking his brains over the best way to bring his name back into literary circulation, the task of reminding the cultural world of his existence was accomplished for him with no special effort on his part. In the issue of
The Contemporary
dated December 1855, a sketch by Panaev contains a section obviously alluding to the critical excitement caused by
Poor Folk
as a result of Belinsky’s praise, and then, with the ensuing collapse of the author’s momentary fame, his abandonment by all those who had previously trumpeted his glory. “Poor fellow!” writes Panaev. “We killed him, we made him ridiculous. It was not his fault. He could not maintain himself at the height on which we had placed him.”
¹¹
Although no names were mentioned, all of the people who counted for Dostoevsky—all the former members of the Belinsky Pléiade with whom he had once been friendly, and all his literary colleagues and rivals—would have been perfectly well aware at whom Panaev was poking fun.

Panaev’s attack, aimed at a man who had spent four long years in prison camp for a political crime and was still serving out his sentence in the Russian Army, was a distinctly vicious blow. But in the narrow little world of St. Petersburg journalism, where editors and writers rubbed elbows every day with high officials of the bureaucracy, rumors about Dostoevsky’s two poems had filtered down and led to a revival of all the antipathy against him that had once been so widespread. Dostoevsky read this insulting lampoon, and we can deduce his outrage from Aleksey Pleshcheev’s letter to him in April 1859. “I told [Nekrasov] frankly that you had decided not to turn to [his journal] except in case of extreme need because they treated you badly; Nekrasov, after hearing me out, said that if . . . 
The Contemporary
spoke shamefully of you while you were in exile, then that was very disgusting.”
¹²

Nekrasov’s uneasiness could well have been caused by a work of his own that Dostoevsky never saw. This mysterious text, finally published in 1917, is a satirical account of how Nekrasov had brought the manuscript of
Poor Folk
to Belinsky. The withering depiction of Dostoevsky it contains was another response to Dostoevsky’s efforts to achieve rehabilitation. The best part of the fragment is the image of the genuine tortures caused Dostoevsky by his mixture of excruciating shyness and inordinate vanity. The same comedy, so reminiscent of
The Double
, is repeated here: Dostoevsky has not the strength to ring Belinsky’s doorbell and retreats back down the staircase, but when Nekrasov remarks that Belinsky might be displeased, he returns in a flash and the two enter.

The mixture of sympathy and derision with which Nekrasov regards his erstwhile friend is the most vivid evocation we have of some of the impressions Dostoevsky created on others in the 1840s. But Nekrasov could not know that the figure he described no longer existed. For Dostoevsky had sloughed off completely his crippling insecurity and hypochondria in the prison camp. “If you believe there is still anything remaining in me of that nervousness, that apprehensiveness, that tendency to suspect that I had every conceivable illness, as in Petersburg,” he tells Mikhail, “please change your mind, there is not a trace of that, as of many other things.”
¹⁵
Dostoevsky had been steeled by suffering. And when, on returning from exile, he began to take up the polemical cudgels against
The Contemporary
a few years later, the once ridiculous and timorous “little idol” whom it had been so easy to sneer at proved to be a redoubtable antagonist.

Dostoevsky’s prowess as a polemicist soon became evident in his vehement opposition to the ideas now being propounded in
The Contemporary
by its most notable and influential critic, N. G. Chernyshevsky. More than anyone, Chernyshevsky formulated the ideals and aims of the radical “generation of the 1860s” against which Dostoevsky would unleash the full force of his considerable combative skills.

The son of an obscure priest, and educated in a seminary, Chernyshevsky entered the University of St. Petersburg in 1846, and there he met people who brought him into contact with the ideas current in the Petrashevsky Circle and became converted to Socialism. It was only a matter of chance, as he noted in his
Diary
, that he had not begun to frequent the Petrashevsky Circle himself and had escaped the roundup. Chernyshevsky’s opinions about literature had been formed on the essays of Belinsky’s last period, and the young publicist thus discusses writing mainly in terms of social content, evaluating it in the light of his own preference for a literature continuing the Gogolian tradition (as interpreted by Belinsky) of denunciation and exposure of the evils of society. These articles ruffled the sensibilities of the gentry literati grouped around
The Contemporary
, the representatives of the older generation of the 1840s, who did not appreciate either his unceremonious handling of their own works or his sarcastic jeering tone, which struck them as a breach of good taste.

Chernyshevsky had been educated in a provincial seminary, as had the young Nikolay Dobrolyubov, whom he soon recruited to aid him; so had a good many others who became well-known as writers, journalists, and publicists giving voice to the sentiments of a new generation. They were the first of the
raznochintsy
, the men without official rank or status, who play so dominant a role in Russian culture throughout the remainder of the century. The differences that quickly surfaced between the two generations can be traced to the gulf created by their class backgrounds and the dissimilarities in their education.

The gentry literati looked down on the “seminarians,” as they were called contemptuously, because of their coarseness and lack of breeding. For their part, the seminarians abhorred culture and the reverence for art as a source of wisdom that distinguished the slightly older generation of the 1840s. For Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, such reverence still smacked of religion. As the scions of clerical families, both had been intensely religious in their youth, but they had converted to atheism with equal zeal under the influence of Feuerbach and his Russian Left Hegelian followers such as Belinsky and, more specifically, Herzen. All the same, the stubborn streak of fanaticism in their makeup, and their supreme contempt for the amenities of culture as shameful frivolities, can plausibly be attributed to the heritage of their clerical ancestry.
¹⁶
In any case, they were—or wished to be—hard-headed materialists and positivists, whose energies were devoted to bringing about those radical social changes in which they saw the only hope for the future. The social-cultural influence of the earlier generation, in their view, was one of the major obstacles to a reshaping of the Russian personality along more virile and energetic lines, and such remolding was a necessary precondition for any further progress. A good dose of class antipathy thus envenomed with personal distaste the clashes of opinion that soon began to occur between the two groups.

What had been, at the beginning, only a low murmur of discontent from the gentry literati turned into a cry of outrage when Chernyshevsky published his doctoral thesis,
The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality
, and then reviewed it himself (anonymously) in the pages of
The Contemporary
. Even earlier, Chernyshevsky’s public defense of this work, in the amphitheater of the University of St. Petersburg, had taken on the character of a deliberate defiance of the authorities with distinct social-political overtones. For in rejecting the principles of German Idealist aesthetics, he was in effect attacking all attempts to entice mankind into living in a world of imaginary pleasures and satisfactions when the real material needs of the vast majority still remained to be satisfied. Naturally, no such argument could be made explicitly, but all of Chernyshevsky’s readers knew what was involved when, as Marx had already done with Hegel for much the same reasons, he rejected the Idealist point of view and, as it were, brought art back to earth.

Idealist aestheticians (Hegel and F. T. Vischer) viewed art as a function of man’s desire to improve the imperfections of nature in the name of the ideal. Chernyshevsky, taking the opposite view, flatly affirmed that “Beauty is Life” and that nature, far from being less perfect than art, was the sole source of true pleasure and infinitely superior to art in every respect. Indeed, art exists only because it is impossible for man always to satisfy his real needs; hence, art is useful, but solely as a surrogate until the genuine article comes along. “The imagination builds castles in the air,” Chernyshevsky writes sarcastically, “when the dreamer lacks not only a good house, but even a tolerable hut.”
¹⁷
By making art subordinate to life and its real demands, Chernyshevsky was telling the artist that his task is to fulfill the social needs of the moment—whatever these needs happen to be in the opinion of the critic. It is also clear that, if Chernyshevsky’s ideas are accepted, art is left without any independent value or stature.

The publication of Chernyshevsky’s thesis blew up a storm in the Russian periodical press, and a torrent of criticism hailed down on the head of the audacious young iconoclast. Even the mild-mannered and temperate Turgenev was incensed, and his letters show how disturbed he was at this heavy-handed assault
on his artistic pieties. “I have not read anything for a long time that so upset me,” he writes to Kraevsky, who had printed a critical onslaught against the book in
Notes of the Fatherland
. “
It is worse than an evil book; it is—an evil deed
.”
¹⁸
Dostoevsky would have been as much opposed to Chernyshevsky’s ideas, if not more so, than Turgenev, Tolstoy, and all the others who had spoken up with indignation. For Dostoevsky’s defense of the role of Christianity in art in his planned
Letters on Art
would also have met head-on the atheistic implications of Chernyshevsky’s rejection of “imagination.” This will indeed be an important thrust of the attack he will launch, in just a few years, on the Utilitarian aesthetics of the radicals.