Dostoevsky (69 page)

During 1861, Dostoevsky made a clean polemical sweep of the existing social-political ideologies in Russia. Not only did he take on the radical left (
The Contemporary
), the liberal left (
Notes of the Fatherland
), and the liberal center (
The Russian Messenger
), but he also had his word to say about the new Slavophil publication
Day
(
Den
’). Despite his efforts at nonpartisan commentary, however,
Time
acquired the reputation, during its first year, of belonging to the camp of
The Contemporary
, and Strakhov and Grigoryev were chafing at the bit.

Doing what he could to right the balance, Strakhov kept up a steady sniping fire against the radicals in articles written as letters addressed to the editor. Shrewd in spotting significant social-political trends, in June 1861 he singles out the explosive début of a new young radical publicist, Dimitry Pisarev, who had excitedly announced in
The Russian Word
that all the philosophy of the past was just “useless scholasticism.” Strakhov comments that “Pisarev has gone further than all” his fellow radicals on the path of negation: “He rejects everything . . . in the name of life, and life he obviously understands as the alluring variety of lively and unlimited pleasures.”
¹⁵
In this acute observation, Strakhov picks out an important turn of radical ideology toward an unrestrained individualism that, in the very next year, would lead to a schism among the radical intelligentsia of decisive importance for Russian culture in the 1860s.

Dostoevsky regularly appended footnotes to articles to dissociate himself from Strakhov’s condemnation of radicals. What he reproached the radicals for, more openly in his notebooks than in public print, was their hastiness and impatience, their desire to leap over history and to bring about changes that could be realized only at a much later stage of Russian social development. “Where are you hurrying?” he asks Chernyshevsky in one note. “Our society is positively not ready for anything. The questions stand before us. They have ripened, they are ready, but our society is not ready in the least. It is disunited” (20: 153). Dostoevsky’s tolerance for the radicals was already beginning to stretch a bit thin, and it snapped the following year, when the contributors and readers of
The Contemporary
turned from intellectual disaffection to active political agitation.

The basis for all further progress in Russia, as Dostoevsky saw it, was to work peacefully in favor of the advances made possible by the liberation of the serfs and the further impending reforms that Alexander II had announced.
Time
printed the full text of the manifesto announcing the liberation and referred to it as a “sublime event” initiating a glorious new phase of Russian history.
The Contemporary
, on the other hand, let the occasion pass without uttering a single word: the radicals had been bitterly disappointed by the terms of the liberation, which they considered imposed too great a tax burden on the peasantry in favor of the idle and undeserving landowners.

¹
For an analysis of “Mr. Prokharchin,” see Joseph Frank,
Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849
(Princeton, NJ, 1976), 133–136.

²
Jane Delaney Grossman,
Edgar Allen Poe in Russia
(Wurzberg, 1973), 34.

³
E. A. Poe, “The Black Cat,” in
Complete Works
, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. (New York, 1902; rpt. 1965), 4: 146.

⁴
PSS
, 18: 280–281.

⁵
Pis’ma
, 1: 183–184; April 13, 1856.

⁶
N. G. Chernyshevsky,
Selected Philosophical Essays
(Moscow, 1953), 376.

⁷
N. A. Dobrolyubov,
Selected Philosophical Essays
, trans. J. Fineberg (Moscow, 1956), 542.

⁸
Chernyshevsky,
Essays
, 317–318.

⁹
Dostoevsky’s imaginative reading of this poem receives some indirect confirmation from the remarks of Roman Jakobson about the symbolic meaning attributed to sculpture in the Russian tradition. “It is important to see,” he writes, “that in his poems [those of Pushkin] the statue is most often called
idol
, something which had greatly surprised Tsar Nicholas I in
The Bronze Horseman
. Whether it is Pushkin the atheist, Blok the heretic, or the antireligious poetry of Mayakovsky, Russian poets had been raised in the world of Orthodox customs, and their work, whether intentionally or not, is steeped in
the symbolism of the Eastern Church
. It is the Orthodox tradition, which vehemently forbade sculpture, did not allow it inside churches, and considered it a pagan or diabolic sin (the two notions were the same for the Church), which suggested to Pushkin
the close link uniting statues and idolatry, diabolism and magic
.”

Jakobson then quotes Gogol to prove that, “from the Russian point of view, sculpture and the image of paganism” are inseparable. “It [sculpture] was born at the same time as the finite pagan world,” Gogol had written, “it expressed [that world] and died at the same time. . . . It was, in the same degree as pagan belief, separated from Christianity by a frontier.” Jakobson’s article, originally published in Czech, is here quoted from the French translation of his selected criticism. Roman Jakobson, “La statue dans la symbolique de Pouchkine,” in
Questions de poétique
, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. by several hands (Paris, 1973), 186–187.

¹⁰
Dostoevsky is here paraphrasing a famous poem of Pushkin, “The Poet and the Crowd,” in which the poet scornfully tells the benighted mob, “The Apollo Belvedere is for you an idol. / In him no usefulness—usefulness—do you discern.”
PSS
, 18: 289.

¹¹
Pis’ma
, 1: 142; February 20, 1854.

¹²
For more information on these matters, see V. S. Nechaeva,
Zhurnal M. M. i F. M. Dostoevskikh
, Vremya,
1861–1863
(Moscow, 1973), 155–210, esp. 183, 188.

¹³
Matthew Arnold,
Poems
(London, 1888), 214.

¹⁴
In her preface to an edition of
The Insulted and Injured
, L. M. Rosenblyum remarks: “Although, in the uncovering of Valkovsky’s views, no direct association is visible with the materialism of [the generation of] the 1860s, one may, all the same, assume that they contain, of course in a covert form, an onslaught against Chernyshevsky’s
The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy
—the work in which the ethical principles of the radical democrats are set forth.
The Anthropological Principle
was published a year before
The Insulted and Injured
.” See F. M. Dostoevsky,
Unizhennye i oskorblennye
, ed. L. M. Rosenblyum (Moscow, 1955), 25;
PSS
, 3: 527–528.

¹⁵
Nikolay Strakhov,
Iz istorii literaturnago nigilizma
(St. Petersburg, 1890; rpt. The Hague, 1967), 34.

Dostoevsky’s novel
The Insulted and Injured
(
Unizhennye i oskorblennye
), began to appear as a serial in the first issue of
Time
and ran through seven numbers of the journal. The work encountered a mixed critical reception, but it was read with avid attention and achieved its purpose of making readers impatient for the next installment. Dobrolyubov devoted his very last essay, “Downtrodden People” (
Zabitye lyudi
), a classic of Russian criticism, to a penetrating survey of the entire corpus of Dostoevsky’s writings up to and including this latest product of his pen. In an obvious reply to Dostoevsky’s attack some months earlier, he remarked that the book was “beneath aesthetic criticism,” but, he acknowledged, everyone had been reading what stood out as the most interesting Russian novel published in 1861.
¹

Our contemporary view of Dostoevsky can hardly be that of Dobrolyubov, but there is no reason to disagree with his verdict:
The Insulted and Injured
is by far the weakest of Dostoevsky’s six major post-Siberian novels. Nor did Dostoevsky himself have any illusions about the quality of his own creation. “I recognize fully,” he publicly admitted several years later, “that in my novel there are many characters who are puppets and not human beings, perambulating books and not characters who have taken on artistic form (this really requires time and a gestation of ideas in the mind and the soul)” (20: 134). Whatever its manifest flaws, however,
The Insulted and Injured
allows us to catch the author in a stage of transition, trying his hand for the first time at mastering the technique of the roman-feuilleton and also giving new character-types, themes, and motifs their initial, inchoate expression.

The Insulted and Injured
is composed of two interweaving plot lines, which at first seem to have little to do with each other but then gradually draw together as the story unfolds. The first, typical of the sentimental Romantic novel, concerns an impoverished gentry family, the Ikhmenyevs. Their daughter, Natasha, falls in love with Alyosha, the son of a wealthy neighbor, Prince Valkovsky; and
when the prince frowns on their romance because he has destined Alyosha for a wealthy heiress, the two young people run away and live together out of wedlock. As a result, Natasha is renounced by her outraged father, Nikolay Sergeevich Ikhmenyev, not only for having disgraced the family escutcheon but also because Prince Valkovsky, once a friend and supposed benefactor, has now become his deadly enemy. The crux of this plot line is the mutual unhappiness of Natasha and her father, who love each other deeply despite her lethal blow to the family pride and his furious condemnation of her scandalous behavior.

The second plot line introduces the roman-feuilleton Gothic element of mystery, secret intrigue, and venal betrayal. It focuses on the figure of little Nellie, a thirteen-year-old Petersburg waif, whom the narrator, a young novelist named Ivan Petrovich—a foster-son of the Ikhmenyevs, and once engaged to to Natasha—meets by chance. Intrigued by the eccentric appearance of an old man in a coffeehouse, the young observer of life follows him into the street and, when the oldster collapses and dies on the spot, moves into his dingy room. The deceased man was the grandfather of little Nellie, who comes to visit him and finds Ivan Petrovich occupying his quarters. Little Nellie is rescued from the clutches of a procuress by her new acquaintance and his friend Masloboev, an ex-school-teacher leading a shady existence on the edge of the Petersburg underworld but still retaining some traces of the moral idealism of his youth. Ivan Petrovich takes Nellie in to live with him, looks after her welfare, and gradually pieces together the pathetic story of her appalling existence.

By a coincidence typical of the roman-feuilleton, she turns out to be—as we learn at the very end of the book—the prince’s abandoned daughter. Valkovsky had seduced her mother, persuaded his infatuated young wife to rob her wealthy father, Jeremy Smith, and then had discarded her and their child once he had obtained possession of the money. The two plots finally come together when, in order to reconcile Natasha with
her
father, and at the prompting of Ivan Petrovich, Nellie tells the heart-rending story of her life. Painting in dismal colors the refusal of her grandfather to forgive her mother even as she lay destitute and dying on the floor of a dank Petersburg hovel, Nellie’s piteous tale brings about the forgiveness of Natasha and defeats the plan of the villainous Valkovsky to throw the unprotected girl into the arms of the lecherous old Count Nainsky.

All the events are seen through the eyes of Ivan Petrovich, who is an obvious physical link between the two plots, just as Valkovsky is a more covert one. Ivan Petrovich is writing about a year after the events have taken place, and an additional element of pathos is provided by the situation in which he finds himself as he takes pen in hand to tell his story. “It has all ended in my being here in the hospital,” he explains, “and I believe I am soon going to die. . . . I want to write it all down, and if I had not found this occupation I believe I should have died
of misery” (3: 177). The tale recounts the shipwreck of his own life, and he is about to perish with a sense of waste and despair. But he has nonetheless succeeded in rescuing others (the Ikhmenyevs), in surrounding the last days of Nellie with loving tenderness, and in remaining true to himself and the values of kindness and compassion in which he believes.