Dostoevsky (180 page)

Leontiyev’s own position, on the contrary, is that of a “Christian pessimism,” which confronts the “irremediable tragedy of earthly life” with an unflinching realism. “Suffering, loss, the disillusionment of injustice
must be
,” he wrote. “They are even useful to us for our repentance and the salvation of our souls beyond the grave.” He identifies his own position with that of Pobedonostsev’s speech, which had not advocated any unconditional love for humanity at all. The most important love, the procurator had proclaimed, was love for the Orthodox Church and a strict, unswerving adherence to its dogmas. “Christ,” as
Leontiyev declared, “is not known otherwise than through the Church,” but in Dostoevsky’s speech the Saviour “is to such an extent available to all of us outside the Church [that] we allow ourselves the right to ascribe to him a promise he never uttered” (that is, the earthly paradise).
¹⁴

Dostoevsky’s immediate response to Pobedonostsev was to remark that “in the final analysis Leontiyev is a bit of a heretic . . . [though] there is much of interest in his opinions.”
¹⁵
But since Pobedonostsev, as the official head of the Orthodox Church, approved of Leontiyev’s article (which cited his own words), Dostoevsky was in effect imputing a bit of “heresy” to him as well. One wonders what the procurator of the Holy Synod might have thought of the entry that Dostoevsky made in his notebook for a future (but never written) reply to his critic. “
Leontiyev (it is not worth doing good in the world, for it is said, it will be destroyed)
. There’s something foolhardy and dishonest in this idea. Most of all, it’s a very convenient idea for ordinary behavior: since everything is doomed, why exert oneself, why love to do good? Live for your paunch” (27: 51–52). He thus refused, on moral-social grounds, to adopt the fatalistic, exclusively otherworldly perspective of his critic, who saw the existence of evil as necessary for salvation and thus hardly to be combated or opposed. For Dostoevsky, humanity was endowed with the freedom to struggle against evil, and Christian love would ultimately triumph, although his predictions of a transformation of human life appear to be reserved for a miraculous heavenly upheaval.

On August 10, Dostoevsky sent off the concluding chapters of Book 11, and told Lyubimov that Chapters 6, 7, and 8, depicting Ivan’s visits to Smerdyakov, had “turned out well.” “But I don’t know,” he adds, “how you’ll view Chapter 9.” Dostoevsky was concerned that the masterly depiction of Ivan’s hallucination and encounter with the devil might not be accepted as written, and he assures Lyubimov that its details had been “checked with the opinion of doctors” and explains that “it’s not just a physical (diseased) trait here, when a person begins at times to lose the distinction between the real and the unreal (which has happened to almost every person at least once in his life), but a spiritual trait as well, which coincides with the hero’s character: in denying the reality of the phantom, he defends its reality when the phantom disappears.
Tormented by lack of faith, he (unconsciously) wishes at the same time that the phantom were not imaginary, but something real
.”
¹⁶

For Dostoevsky, “the fantastic” was created by the oscillation between the real and the supernatural and the difficulty of deciding between the two. In his notes for Ivan’s encounter with the devil, he thus reminds himself several times to
depict the rather grubby materiality of Ivan’s supernatural visitor. “Satan enters and sits down (a gray old man, warty)” (15: 320). Satan is also greatly concerned about his health, fearing that he has caught a cold on his journey to earth through the glacial realms of interstellar space; and there are several references to “Hoffmann’s Malt Extract” as a remedy, as well as to “honey and salt” (15: 336). All these anchor Satan firmly in the quotidian reality of ordinary existence, while he remains a supernatural Satan at the same time. Surely with Dante and Milton in mind, Dostoevsky humorously apologizes for having portrayed the devil in such an inglorious guise—“he’s only a devil, a petty devil, and not Satan ‘with scorched wings.’ ”
¹⁷

Dostoevsky’s stroke of genius was to provide this thematic topos with a religious-philosophical dimension by transforming Ivan’s doubts about the reality of the devil into the question of whether or not he believes in the existence of a supernatural realm, and hence of God. He wishes to believe in what he sees in order to convince himself, on the purely psychological level, that he is not losing his mind; but he also wishes Satan to be only a hallucination so as to preserve his conviction that God does not exist. Thus, the oscillation of “the fantastic” here receives perhaps its greatest literary expression as Dostoevsky turns its ambiguities into a probing of the question of religious faith.

Although irritated at the lack of notice accorded the appearance of the
Diary
(“if Goncharov hiccuped, all the newspapers would immediately start crying: ‘Our venerable novelist has hiccuped’—while they ignore me”),
¹⁸
Dostoevsky was now totally absorbed in writing the final chapters of
The Brothers Karamazov
. By September 30, Dostoevsky had completed Book 12, which terminates with the conviction of Dimitry Karamazov for the murder of his father. Work on these chapters had been interrupted on September 2 by “a terrible epileptic attack” that incapacitated him for eight days, but on the eleventh he resumed work, and these pages were sent to Lyubimov on October 6, the same day that the Dostoevsky family returned to Petersburg from Staraya Russa. Only the epilogue, containing the funeral of little Ilyusha and Alyosha’s graveside speech to the assembled boys, remained to be written.

Meanwhile, on October 15, he penned a long letter to Pelagaya Guseva, a novelist whom he had met in Bad Ems in 1875. Guseva had reprimanded him in several letters for not replying to her missives, which asked him not only to retrieve a manuscript of hers from the journal
Light
(
Ogonka
) but also to aid her in placing it elsewhere. Dostoevsky acceded to her request, even though “I wouldn’t lift a finger for anyone else,” but “this is for you, in memory of Ems; I remember you
too well
.”
¹⁹
In one of her letters Guseva confesses that, while not
“indifferent” to Dostoevsky in Bad Ems, she had “heroically concealed” from him “her sinful feelings.” Possibly she had not succeeded as well as she imagined, and it was for this reason that Dostoevsky still felt a certain obligation to a lady who had found him so powerfully attractive.

Before acceding to her request, however, he details all the woes by which he is presently afflicted. He has worked so intensively at finishing his novel that “if there is a person at hard labor, it’s me. I was at hard labor in Siberia, for four years, but the work and life there were more bearable than the present one.” He has no time at all to read a single book, or even to talk to his children (“and I don’t”). His emphysema is so bad that “my days are numbered. Because of my hard work my epilepsy also has gotten worse.” Moreover, he is assailed by people asking him for answers to all their personal problems, and unless “I resolve some insoluble ‘accursed’ question,” the petitioner says he will “be driven to shoot himself. (And I’m seeing him for the first time.)” Overwhelmed by invitations to participate in every benefit reading, Dostoevsky wails, “When am I to think, when am I to work, when am I to read, when am I to live?”
²⁰

Four days later, he felt free to attend one of the regular Tuesday salons at the home of Elena Shtakenshneider. The gathering lasted until three in the morning, much later than customary, and the evening was so unusually animated that the hostess wrote a lengthy entry in her diary. Poems were read, songs were sung by guests accompanied at the piano by accomplished musicians, and “no one noticed how time was passing.” Dostoevsky read “The Prophet” again (since the Pushkin festival it had more and more become identified with his own personality), as well as some other poems from Pushkin, Dante, and one from John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
. “What a fantastic and devious old man!” she writes. “[Dostoevsky] is himself a magical tale, with its miracles, unexpected surprises, transformations, with its enormous terrors and its trifles.”
²¹

She describes him as often sitting in her living room morose and silent, brooding over some imagined slight, his eyes sunken, his head hanging, his lower lip twisted in a crooked half-smile. At such moments he spoke to no one, or if he did so, only in abrupt outbursts; but if he managed to say something “with a drop of malice,” then his ill mood vanished, “as if a spell had been lifted,” and he would smile and join in the general conversation. “To those who knew him,” she adds, “he is very kind, genuinely kind, despite all his malice; he may give way to the wretched disposition of his soul, but then he repents and wishes to compensate with amiability.”
²²

Another entry in Elena Shtakenshneider’s diary comments on a visit to her home by Anna and the children early on the day Dostoevsky was scheduled to
read at an afternoon benefit for the Literary Fund. “Really, her husband is a curious fellow, judging from her words,” she writes. “He does not sleep at night, thinking over ways to provide for his children, works like a convict, denies himself everything, never even taking a carriage to go anywhere, and he, without saying a word about it, supports his brother and stepson [somewhat an exaggeration—J. F.] . . . [and] still concerns himself with the first person he meets if this is requested.” Anna went on in this vein with examples of his charities, complaining that he could not go anywhere, for a walk or a journey, without an open pocketbook, ready to scatter largesse to all who appealed to his kindness. “ ‘That’s how we live,’ she concluded, ‘And if something happens, where do we turn? How will we live? We are poor! No pension will be coming our way.’ ”
²³

His reading for the Literary Fund, which included “The Prophet,” was an enormous success, and she marveled that Dostoevsky, “ill, with a sickly chest and emphysema,” seemed “to grow in size and become healthier” as he read. In ordinary conversation he coughed continually, but his cough vanished when he declaimed, “as if it did not dare” to manifest itself.
²⁴
Such triumphs on the platform no doubt served to reassure him about the “prophetic” mission he had assumed, but it is likely that nothing at this time brought him greater satisfaction than a few lines in a letter that Tolstoy wrote to his faithful correspondent Strakhov on September 26: “Just recently I was feeling unwell and read
House of the Dead
. I had forgotten a good bit, read it over again, and I do not know a better book in all our new literature, including Pushkin. It’s not the
tone
but the wonderful point of view—genuine, natural, and Christian. A splendid, instructive book. I enjoyed myself the whole day as I have not done for a long time. If you see Dostoevsky, tell him that I love him.”
²⁵
Dostoevsky was then living in Staraya Russa, and it was only on November 2 that Strakhov conveyed Tolstoy’s praise to him.

“I saw Dostoevsky,” Strakhov informs the recluse of Yasnaya Polyana, “and transmitted to him your praise and love. He was greatly overjoyed, and I had to leave with him the page of your letter containing such precious words. He was a little annoyed at your derogation of Pushkin which is expressed there. . . . ‘How including [Pushkin]?’ he asked. I said that you had been even earlier, and now had particularly become, a hardened freethinker.”
²⁶

On November 7, Dostoevsky completed work on
The Brothers Karamazov
and sent the final section to Lyubimov. “Well, and so the novel is finished,” he wrote elegiacally. “I have worked on it for three years, spent two publishing it—this is a significant moment for me. . . . Allow me not to say farewell to you.
After all, I intend to live and write for another twenty years.”
²⁷
The completion of the manuscript of his greatest work had no doubt filled him with a happy sense of renewed vigor, which overshadowed his previous comments about the dangerous state of his health. Alas, the more pessimistic prediction in so many of his letters turned out to be all too justified.

¹
PSS
, 30/Bk. 1: 187–188; June 13, 1880.

²
Ibid.

³
Ibid., 191; June 15, 1880.

⁴
Ibid., 192.

⁵
Ibid., 196–197; July 6, 1880.

⁶
Ibid., 197–198; July 17, 1880.

⁷
DVS
, 2: 381–382.

⁸
Lucrezia Floriani, the main character in a novel by George Sand, bears a number of illegitimate children to various lovers while searching for an ideal mate.

⁹
Letopis zhizni i tvorchestvo F. M. Dostoevskogo
, ed. N. F. Budanova and G. M. Fridlender, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1995), 2: 449.