Authors: Joseph Frank
Dostoevsky (176 page)
The session of June 8 opened with some introductory remarks and a poem, “To the Memory of Pushkin,” written and read by Dostoevsky’s old companion in the Petrashevsky circle, Aleksey Pleshcheev. Then it was Dostoevsky’s turn, and, to use the words of Marcus Levitt, he advanced to the podium “to hijack the festival.”
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Even though many accounts exist of what became an epochal event, none takes us so directly to its heart as his own, written on the night of his astonishing triumph. “No, Anya, no,” he writes, “you can never conceive of and imagine the effect it produced! What are my Petersburg successes! Nothing,
zero
, compared to this! When I came out, the hall thundered with applause and it was a very long time before they let me read. I waved, made gestures, begging to be allowed to
read—nothing helped: rapture, enthusiasm (all because of
The Karamazovs
). I finally began reading: I was stopped by thunderous applause on absolutely every page, and sometimes even at every sentence. I read loudly, with fire.”
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From Gleb Uspensky, we obtain the view of an outside observer who, at the beginning of the session, noticed Dostoevsky sitting “as quietly as a mouse” (
smirnekhonko
) at the back of the stage as if in hiding, “scribbling something in a notebook.”
When his turn came, he
smirnekhonko
stepped up to the speaker’s stand, and not five minutes had elapsed before everyone without exception present in the assemblage, all hearts, all thoughts, all souls, were in his power. He spoke to them simply, absolutely as if he were conversing with an acquaintance, not declaiming weighty phrases in a loud voice or tossing his head. Simply and distinctly, without the slightest digression or unnecessary embellishment, he told the public that he thought of Pushkin as someone who expressed the strivings, hopes, and wishes of that very public—the one listening to him at that moment, in that hall. He found it possible, so to speak, to bring Pushkin into that hall, and with his words clarify for all those gathered there something about their own present anxieties, their present anguish. Until Dostoevsky, no one had done that, and this was the major reason for the extraordinary success of his speech.
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How was Dostoevsky able to accomplish this remarkable feat? Drawing on a lifetime of observations about Pushkin scattered through his work,
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and employing his most brilliant critical style, he unites these ideas into a powerful synthesis hailing Pushkin as the poetic herald of the glorious mission that Russia has been called upon to accomplish on behalf of humanity. Dostoevsky usually interprets literary works not in terms of the author’s personality or the historical and social-cultural problems with which he or he may have been engaged, but always in the light of some larger issue. His criticism is thus an example of what Nietzsche called the “monumental” style of historical writing, in which the subject becomes a symbolic expression of some much greater theme, whether psychological, moral-metaphysical, or religious. In this instance, he turns Pushkin into a symbol of his own Russian messianism and his exalted conception of “the people,” which now harmonized so perfectly with the emotions of the vast majority of his audience.
He begins by citing Gogol—“Pushkin is an extraordinary and, perhaps, unique manifestation of the Russian spirit”—a citation that wipes out at the very start Turgenev’s reference to the replacement of the artistic Pushkin by the satirical
Gogol. For Dostoevsky, Pushkin was not only “extraordinary” but above all “prophetic,” and it is the essence of this prophecy that he intends to illuminate. He divides Pushkin’s work into three periods, though stressing that no hard-and-fast boundaries can be drawn. “The accepted view is that during this first period of his work Pushkin imitated the European poets . . . particularly Byron.” Dostoevsky, however, insists that “even [his imitations] expressed the extraordinary independence of his genius. Imitations never contain the kind of personal suffering and depth of self-consciousness that Pushkin displayed” (26: 136–137).
As an example, he takes Pushkin’s early poem, “The Gypsies” (1824), in which a Russian nobleman named Aleko leaves civilization to live with his gypsy mistress and joins her wandering tribe. Dostoevsky interprets this scenario as already emblematic of a fundamental Russian dilemma, which gave birth to a new character type. “In Aleko, Pushkin had already found and brilliantly rendered that unhappy wanderer in his native land, that historical suffering Russian who appeared with such historical inevitability in our educated society after it had broken away from the people.”
As he enlarges on Pushkin’s creation of this type, he manages, in Uspensky’s words, to bring Pushkin into that very hall. The “Russian wanderer” has become “a permanent fixture” of the culture, and Dostoevsky now imagines his successors “running off to Socialism, which did not yet exist in Aleko’s time.” Pushkin’s “wanderer” thus becomes identical with the Socialist youth who were hanging from the rafters of the auditorium and drinking in Dostoevsky’s every word—not to mention a Populist Socialist like Uspensky himself. And then, alluding to those who now “take this new faith in a different field and work it zealously” (those who “went to the people”), Dostoevsky sees them as adding an additional trait to the character of the “Russian wanderer.” What he needs is no longer something purely personal but something universal: he needs “the happiness of the whole world in order to find his own peace of mind” (26: 137).
Dostoevsky steps back to glance at the historical roots of this character type, dating it from “just at the beginning of the second century after the great Petrine reforms”; it was then that educated Russian society became totally “detached from the people and the people’s strength.” Of course, an awareness of this detachment did not affect the vast majority of Russians, but “it is enough if it happens merely to ‘the chosen few’ . . . since through them the remaining vast majority will be deprived of their peace of mind.” Aleko was seeking something but did not know what, but in fact he and those like him were seeking “for the truth which someone, somewhere had lost, and which he simply cannot find.” Later Russian generations, instead of turning to nature, went to Europe’s “stable historical order and well-established civic and social life” in search of this lost truth. This quest was a self-deception, however, because “the wanderer” must find the truth “first of all, within himself”; but how could he understand this necessity
when he has become a stranger in his own native land, “no more than a blade of grass, torn from its stem and carried off by the wind. And he can sense that and suffer for it, and often suffer so painfully!” (26: 138).
Aleko was called “a disdainful man” by the gypsies, who drive him away after he commits a murder out of jealousy; and while Dostoevsky acknowledges this Romantic climax to be “far-fetched,” he nonetheless accepts the characterization of Aleko as “real, and Pushkin’s perception here [as] apt.” Aleko is still a Russian nobleman who takes full advantage of his station and “angrily attacks his opponent and punishes him” when he is offended. But Dostoevsky also detects in the poem a suggestion of “the Russian solution” to Aleko’s rage, “in accordance with the people’s faith and truth.” This solution is: “Humble yourself, O haughty man; first curb thy pride; Humble yourself, O idle man; first labor on thy native soil!”
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Proclaimed here is Dostoevsky’s statement of his positive ideal, which he identifies with the people’s “truth.” Urging “the Russian wanderer”—and all those like him in the audience—to accomplish such a self-conquest, Dostoevsky assures them “you will embark on a great task and make others free . . . you will find happiness . . . and you will at last understand your people and their sacred truth” (26: 138–139). No passage in the speech aroused more commentary, both positive and negative, than this call for humility and submission.
If “this solution . . . is already strongly suggested” in “The Gypsies,” Dostoevsky finds it even more clearly expressed in
Evgeny Onegin
(1833), whose first chapters were composed during the writing of “The Gypsies.” The main figure again “wanders in anguish through his native land and through foreign parts” and is everywhere a stranger. “It’s true that he loves his native land, but he has no faith in it” and looks down “with sad mockery” on those who do have faith. Onegin kills Lensky “simply out of spleen,” and such spleen “may have been caused by his longing for some universal ideal.” He compares Onegin with Tatyana, whom he sees as the embodiment of the Russian ideal, and he regrets that the poet did not use her name for his title; it is she, after all, who is the positive protagonist of the work. “One might even say that a positive type of Russian woman of such beauty has almost never been repeated in our literature except, perhaps, in the character of Liza in Turgenev’s
Nest of Gentlefolk
” (26: 140). This tribute to Turgenev was unexpected and much appreciated; he was sitting on the stage, and everyone could see that he blew a kiss in Dostoevsky’s direction when the flattering reference was made.
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In comparing Onegin to Tatyana, Dostoevsky turns her into someone “who stands solidly on her own native soil” and is the incarnation of true Russian folk values (though in fact she is no more a member of “the people” than Onegin himself). Onegin’s rejection of the love she offers him at the beginning of this novel in verse is transformed into an exemplum of his contempt for the treasures to be found in his native land. While Dostoevsky concedes that “he treated her honorably . . . Onegin’s manner of looking down on people caused him to disregard Tatyana entirely when he met her for the first time, in a provincial backwater, and in the humble image of a pure, innocent girl so timid in his presence.” He could not appreciate her sterling moral qualities because “he is a man of abstractions, he is a restless dreamer and has been so all his life.” Onegin did not understand Tatyana, but, after the famous stanzas describing her visit to his room (Dostoevsky speaks of “their matchless beauty and profundity”), where she examines his foreign books and trinkets, she finally understands his essential hollowness: “
Uzh ne parodiya li?
” (“Is he not a parody?”) (26: 140–141).
It is only later, when he meets her again as the queen of Petersburg society, “married to a worthy old general whom she cannot love because she loves Onegin,” that he is suddenly overcome by her charms. But when he throws himself at her feet in adoration, she turns him away: “
No ya drugomu otdana / Ya budu vek emu verna
” (But I have been given to another / And will be true to him for life). Dostoevsky exalts this decision as Tatyana’s “apotheosis”; here she speaks specifically “as a Russian woman” and as the embodiment of Russian moral values—at least as Dostoevsky understood them. And here too, as everyone in the audience knew, he was taking issue with a famous passage of Belinsky’s in which the critic, under the influence of French Utopian Socialism and George Sand, had refused to recognize any moral sublimity in Tatyana’s conduct. Belinsky considered her loyalty to a marriage bond not based on love as immoral rather than praiseworthy. (Kolya Krasotkin, inspired by Belinsky, had recently parroted this criticism of Tatyana as he paraded his adolescent braggadacio in the pages of
The Brothers Karamazov
.)
For Dostoevsky, however, Tatyana’s faithfulness stems from her deep-rootedness in the values of the Russian folk soul. She refused to evade the moral responsibility for her own earlier decision. She knew that the abandonment of her husband “would cast shame and disgrace upon him and would mean his death. And can one found happiness on the unhappiness of another?” Dostoevsky here speaks in the very accents of Ivan Karamazov as he poses the question of whether an “edifice” of happiness could be built “if its foundations rested on the suffering of, say, even one insignificant creature, but one who had been mercilessly and unjustly tortured?” This query demonstrates the impossibility for Tatyana, as “a pure Russian soul,” to do anything but sacrifice
herself
, rather than to construct her own happiness on the destruction of her innocent husband. What surprises
Dostoevsky “is that for such a long time we cast doubt on the moral solution to this question” (26: 142).
Carrying his analysis of this imbroglio one step further, he insists that Tatyana, even if she were free, would still have rejected Onegin. She would have understood that his character had no substance, that he had become bedazzled by her position in society; his infatuation is no proof that he has come to any better understanding of the values of her soul, of “the Tatyana who was as humble as before.” What he loves is “his fantasy; indeed, he himself is a fantasy.” But she, on the other hand, “still has something solid and unshakable on which her soul can rely. These are her memories of childhood, her memories of her native home deep in the provinces where her humble, pure life began; it is ‘the cross and the shade of boughs o’er the grave of her poor nurse.’ ” All these evocations “represent contact with her native land, her native people and their sacred values.” Onegin completely lacks any such sustenance: “he has no soil under his feet, this blade of grass borne by the wind” (26: 143).