Dostoevsky (82 page)

As for the latest Russian type, the progressive and radical, he neither acts out a farce like Catherine’s courtier nor is troubled by self-doubt; he has become completely and complacently European. “For how self-assured we are now in our civilizing mission. . . . There is no such thing as a native soil, as a people. Nationality?—only a certain system of paying taxes! The soul?—a
tabula rasa
, a bit of wax, out of which you can paste together on the spot a real man, a universal general man, a homuncule—all that’s necessary is to apply the fruits of European civilization, and read two or three books!” (5: 59). One can already hear the jeering, provocative voice of the underground man in these sentences, which contain exactly the inflections of his tone: a partial identification (“we”) with ideas he really abhors and implicitly rejects through the very sarcasm by which they are affirmed. Visibly, Dostoevsky’s meditations on the manner in which Europe has been assimilated into the Russian psyche, and his attempt to dramatize this symbiosis through his own reactions as a
representative
figure, have led him stylistically to the very threshold of his next creation.

With the fourth chapter of
Winter Notes
, Dostoevsky finally crosses the French border and, as we recall, discovers that his railroad compartment has been invaded by police spies. No doubt he wished his Russian readers to feel the proper shudder of horror at such surveillance, and to conclude that the vaunted liberties of the West were simply so many shams: Russians had no reason to be envious of European “liberty.” But Dostoevsky could not let the matter rest, and reinforces this exposure of European hypocrisy by contrasting the presumed Russian reaction with the European violation of the norms of political decency. The elderly couple who ran one of the hotels at which he stayed in Paris, and who requested information about him for the police, anxiously explained that all this documentation was absolutely “ne-cess-ary”—and a very respectable and worthy couple they were, the essence of bourgeois propriety. “But the word ‘ne-cess-ary,’ far from being pronounced in any apologetic or derogatory tone, was uttered, rather, precisely in the sense of the completest necessity to the point of being identical with their own personal convictions” (5: 67–68).
Such, presumably, would not have been the case in Russia, where people bowed to force and the pressure of historical necessity without allowing it to obliterate their moral awareness.

Dostoevsky then quickly moves on to London, the city in which the soullessness and heartlessness of Western life—its crass materialism, its unashamed contempt for anything other than the sordid pursuit of worldly gain—was mirrored in the most arrogantly brazen fashion. The chapter on London bears as its title the single, flamboyant name of the false god of the flesh execrated in the Old Testament, “Baal.” It is this god, transposed into a symbol of modern materialism, before whom all of Western civilization now bows down in prostrate worship; and the results can be seen in the canvas that Dostoevsky brushes in with a palette even darker in hue than that of Dickens, the inspired native poet of the city’s sordidness and mass misery. London is nothing but a pitiless wilderness of wild, half-naked, besotted proletarians, gloomily drowning their despair in debauchery and gin. And over all this chaos of restless, preoccupied crowds, of whistling and roaring machinery, of heart-rending scenes of brutalized degradation, reigns the great idol to whom all render homage—the spirit of Baal embodied in the resplendent and majestic London World’s Fair.

During his eight days in London, Dostoevsky paid an obligatory visit to the famous Crystal Palace to see the second London World’s Fair, which had opened in May 1862 and was dedicated to exhibiting the latest triumphs of science and technology. A monument of modern architecture originally constructed for the first London World’s Fair in 1851 by Sir Joseph Paxton, the huge cast-iron and glass building, covering nineteen acres and located on high ground just outside the city, had since been transformed into a museum. The Crystal Palace thus became for Dostoevsky an image of the unholy spirit of modernity that brooded malevolently over London; and in his imagination this spirit takes on the form of the monstrous Beast whose coming was prophesied in the Apocalypse:

19. Main hall of the Crystal Palace. From
Scientific American
, March 19, 1851.

Dostoevsky thus acknowledges the power of this idol by his awe-struck description of its shrine, but his words are equally plangent when he portrays the
fate of its victims and sacrifices. Any vestiges of human feeling among them seemed to have been obliterated; all he could detect was a frantic search for sensual pleasure and for oblivion. “The people are always the people,” Dostoevsky observes after sketching some London street scenes, “but here everything was so colossal, so striking, that you seemed to grasp tangibly what up to now you had only imagined. Here you no longer see a people, but the systematic, submissive and induced lack of consciousness” (5: 71). What lay at the bottom of all this external splendor, attained at the price of so much human misery, was “the same stubborn, dumb, deep-rooted struggle, the struggle to the death between the general Western principle of individuality and the necessity of somehow living together, of somehow establishing a society and organizing an ant-heap. Even turning into an ant-heap just so as to organize something, just so as not to eat each other up—otherwise, one turns into a cannibal!” (5: 69).
⁴

English (Western) society was thus dominated by the war of all against all, which at best, since some form of social order had to be created, could lead only to the “ant-heap”—to the total, unthinking compliance of human volition with the commands of the social Moloch. How different, we can well imagine Dostoevsky thinking, with the spirit that ruled in the Russian village, no matter how backward and meager in resources! Had he himself not written, just a year before, that the West was incapable of putting the principle of communality into practice because there it “has not fused with life,” while in Russia it already existed as an accepted social fact and only awaited further favorable development?

Shortly after his meeting with Dostoevsky, Herzen once again stated much the same conclusion more sweepingly in a series of open letters addressed to Turgenev entitled
Ends and Beginnings
(Europe was at the end of its historical life, Russia at the beginning). “Petty-bourgeoisiedom,” Herzen states bluntly, “is the final word of the civilization based on the unconditioned rule of property,” and Russia would be able to utter a new “word” in world history because it had never accepted this principle of property as sacrosanct.
⁵
The radical Russian
Socialist Herzen and the
pochvennik
Dostoevsky thus shared the same aversion to Western society and placed the same hopes in the presumed Socialist proclivities of the Russian peasant. But for Dostoevsky these Socialist proclivities were rooted in an exalted conception of Christian self-sacrifice that the enlightened atheist and liberated man of the world Herzen would hardly have been willing to accept as an ideal.

The last three chapters of
Winter Notes
are devoted to Paris, and these pages come closest to giving Dostoevsky’s readers some of the ordinary fare contained in Russian accounts of Europe. All his impressions are highly stylized in the manner of the famous French satirist of the bourgeoisie, Henri Monnier, whom Dostoevsky had read with appreciation as a young man. Monnier’s most famous phrase—
ma femme et mon parapluie!
—had been cited by Dostoevsky in a letter seventeen years earlier,
⁶
and the image of the complacent, self-satisfied, pompously ridiculous French bourgeois whom Monnier pilloried reappears in Dostoevsky’s pages, sketched even more acidly by a pen dipped in caustic contempt.

In general, the image that Dostoevsky conveys is of a society rotten to the core with greed for gold yet consumed with vanity at its own moral perfection. All of French life under Napoleon III is seen as a sinister comedy, staged exclusively for the purpose of allowing the bourgeoisie to enjoy
both
their continual accumulation of wealth and the spectacle of their ineffable virtue. Dostoevsky writes that “all their [the workers] ideal is to become property owners and to possess as many things as possible” (5: 78). While the bourgeoisie fears everyone—the working class, the communists, the Socialists—all such apprehensions are the result of a ludicrous mistake. No group in the West really represents any threat to the hegemony of the
spiritual
principle embodied in the bourgeoisie.

What, after all, has become of the ideals of the French Revolution under the Second Empire, the ideals of
liberté
,
égalité
, and
fraternité
? In momentary accord with Karl Marx and the Socialists, Dostoevsky views political freedom and legal equality, unaccompanied by economic equality, simply as repulsive fictions invented by the bourgeoisie to delude the proletariat. As for
fraternité
, this, Dostoevsky says, is in the most curious position of all. Europe is always talking about brotherhood and has even raised it to the status of a universal ideal, yet brotherhood is the very antithesis of the European character:

Dostoevsky then goes on to describe what brotherhood
really
is; and though he speaks in purely moral terms, every Russian reader would instantly know that the social reality to which he was referring is the Russian peasant
obshchina
, with its land held in common and its democratic administration for the good of all. True brotherhood, as in the
obshchina
, is an instinctive mutual relation between the individual and the community in which each desires only the welfare of the other. The individual does not, as in the West, insist on his exclusive rights as an isolated ego; he freely brings these rights to the community in sacrifice without even being asked to do so. Reciprocally, the community, without making any demands or
imposing
any conditions on the individual, guarantees him equal protection and status with all.