Authors: Joseph Frank
The above remarks about the shortcomings of the critical literature on Dostoevsky apply primarily to books in the various languages other than his own (mainly English, French, and German). It certainly cannot be said that the ideological and philosophical background of Dostoevsky’s creations has not been explored in Russian scholarship and criticism. Indeed, my own analysis of this background is greatly indebted to several generations of Russian scholars and critics such as Dimitry Merezkhovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Leonid Grossman, as well as to philosophers such as Lev Shestov and Nikolay Berdyaev. But as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, it became difficult for Russian scholars, up until very recently, to build on these initiators and to continue to study Dostoevsky impartially and objectively. His greatest works, after all, had been efforts to undermine the ideological foundations out of which that revolution had sprung, and it was thus necessary to highlight his deficiencies rather than his achievements. As for émigré scholars, with very few exceptions their works dwelt on the moral-philosophical implications of Dostoevsky’s ideas rather than on the texts themselves. While utilizing all this interpretative effort with gratitude, I have tried to rectify what seemed to me its limitations, whether caused by ideological restrictions or by nonliterary concerns.
Placing Dostoevsky’s writings in their social-political and ideological context, however, is only the first step toward an adequate comprehension of his works. For what is important about them is not that his characters engage in theoretical disputations. It is, rather, that their ideas become part of their personalities, to such an extent, indeed, that neither exists independently of the other. His unrivaled genius as an ideological novelist was this capacity to invent actions and situations in which ideas dominate behavior without the latter becoming allegorical. He possessed what I call an “eschatological imagination,” one that could envision putting ideas into action and then following them out to their ultimate consequences. At the same time, his characters respond to such consequences according to the ordinary moral and social standards prevalent in their milieu,
and it is the fusion of these two levels that provides Dostoevsky’s novels with both their imaginative range and their realistic grounding in social life.
Dostoevsky’s innate propensity to dramatize ideas in this way was noted in an extremely acute remark by one of his closest associates, the philosopher Nikolay Strakhov. “The most routine abstract thought,” he wrote, “very often struck him with an uncommon force and would stir him up remarkably. He was, in any case, a person in the highest degree excitable and impressionable. A simple idea, sometimes very familiar and commonplace, would suddenly set him aflame and reveal itself to him in all its significance. He, so to speak, felt thought with unusual liveliness. Then he would state it in various forms, sometimes giving it a very sharp, graphic expression, although not explaining it logically or developing its content” (3: 42). It is this inborn tendency of Dostoevsky to “feel thought” that gives his best work its special stamp, and why it is so important to locate his writings in relation to the evolution of ideas in his lifetime.
He came to fame in the 1840s, when his first novel,
Poor Folk
, was hailed by Alexander Herzen as the foremost example of a genuinely Socialist creation in Russian literature. Indeed, all that Dostoevsky published during the 1840s bore the hallmark of his acceptance of the Utopian Socialist ideas then in vogue among a considerable portion of the intelligentsia—ideas that can be considered to have been inspired by Christianity, though recasting its ethos in terms of modern social problems. Nonetheless, although Utopian Socialism did not preach violence to attain its aims, and Dostoevsky’s works are filled with the need for sympathy and compassion, he belonged to a secret group whose aim was to stir up a revolution against serfdom (the existence of this organization did not become known until long after his death). Before this underground cabal could take any action, however, its members were included in the arrest and sentencing of the innocuous discussion group known as the Petrashevsky Circle, to which they all belonged.
The members of this group were submitted to the ordeal of a mock execution before learning of their true sentences, in Dostoevsky’s case imprisonment with hard labor in Siberia. As a result, Dostoevsky’s previously “secular” Christianity underwent a crucial metamorphosis. Hitherto it had been dedicated to the improvement of life on earth; now this aim, without being abandoned, became overshadowed by an awareness of the importance of the hope of eternity as a mainstay of moral existence. His period of imprisonment also convinced him that the need for freedom, particularly the sense of being able to exercise one’s free will, was an ineradicable need of the human personality and could express itself even in apparently self-destructive forms if no other outlet were possible. Also, as Dostoevsky wrote himself, the four years he spent in the prison camp were responsible for “the regeneration of [his] convictions” on a more mundane level. This was a result of his growing awareness of the deep roots of traditional
Christianity in even the worst of peasant criminals, who bowed down during the Easter service, with a clanking of chains, when the priest read the words “accept me, O Lord, even as the thief.” The basis of Dostoevsky’s later faith in what he considered the ineradicable Christian essence of the Russian people arose from such experiences.
When he returned to Russia after a ten-year Siberian exile, he thus found it impossible to accept the reigning ideas of the new generation of the 1860s that had arisen during his absence. Promulgated by Nikolay Chernyshevsky and N. A. Dobrolyubov, these ideas were a peculiar Russian mixture of the atheism of Ludwig Feuerbach, the materialism and rationalism of eighteenth-century French thought, and the English Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. Russian radicalism had acquired a new foundation, labeled “rational egoism” by Chernyshevsky, that the post-Siberian Dostoevsky found it impossible to accept. The first important work he launched against this new credo was
Notes from Underground
, in which the underground man’s belief in the determinism of all human behavior—a determinism asserted by Chernyshevsky to be the final, definitive word of science—clashes irresistibly with the moral sensibilities that, despite his desire to do so, the tormented underground man cannot suppress.
Crime and Punishment
was a response to the ideas of another radical thinker, Dimitry Pisarev, who drew a sharp distinction between the slumbering masses and those superior individuals like Raskolnikov who believed they had a moral right to commit crimes in the interest of humanity. In the end, however, Raskolnikov discovers that his true motive was to test (unsuccessfully) whether he could overcome his Christian conscience to achieve such a goal. The masterly novel
Demons
, still the best ever written about a revolutionary conspiracy, is based on the Nechaev affair, the murder of a young student belonging to an underground group led by Sergey Nechaev. This totally unscrupulous agitator with a will of iron composed a
Catechism of a Revolutionary
whose Utilitarian approval of any means to obtain presumably beneficial social ends makes Machiavelli look like a choirboy.
Aside from contesting the ideas he opposed, Dostoevsky also aspired to create a Christian moral image that would serve as a positive example for the new generation.
The Idiot
is an attempt to portray such a Christian ideal to counter the “rational egoism” that Dostoevsky was attacking; but it was finally impossible for him to have Prince Myshkin end in anything but disaster. Such a worldly failure is of course inherent in the paradigm of Christ’s self-sacrifice; but Dostoevsky by this time had also come to believe that “to love man like oneself, according to the commandment of Christ, is impossible. The law of personality on earth binds. The ego stands in the way.” It is only in the afterlife that “the law of personality” could be decisively overcome.
The 1870s marked a new phase in Dostoevsky’s work because these years saw a mutation in radical ideology itself. Radical publicists such as N. K. Mikhailovsky and Peter Lavrov had now rejected the Western notion of “progress” as the only path of social evolution. Without surrendering their unrelenting opposition to the tsarist regime, these thinkers, in a criticism of capitalism influenced by Marx’s denunciation of the “primitive accumulation” that turned peasants into proletarians, began to search in their homeland for alternatives to the relentless pauperization of the lower class they saw taking place in Europe. With the serfs having been liberated in 1861, it was feared that the same process would inevitably occur in Russia. Dostoevsky had observed the results of this social transformation during his first trip to Europe in 1862 and denounced it as the triumph of the flesh-god Baal.
The radicals thus began to reevaluate the merits of Russian peasant life, and this brought them much closer to Dostoevsky than in the past. Such a change of perspective is surely one reason why his next novel,
A Raw Youth
, was unexpectedly published in the radical journal,
Notes of the Fatherland
. It contains a brilliantly limned portrait of the main character, an intellectual caught between an unsatisfied need for religious faith and his attraction to the stabilities of such faith among the peasantry. It also includes the first (and only) important peasant character in any of Dostoevsky’s novels, a figure who provides the book with a moral anchor amidst its all too complicated romantic intrigue.
The Russian radicals had now accepted the moral-social values of Russian peasant life, rooted in the Orthodox Christian faith, but they still refused to accept that faith themselves, the source of such values, and continued to cling to their atheism. Such an inner contradiction lies at the heart of Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel,
The Brothers Karamazov
, which bravely attempts to cope with this issue by employing the theme of theodicy. How could a God, presumably of love, have created a world in which evil existed? The radicals of the 1860s had simply denied the existence of God, but those of the 1870s, as Dostoevsky wrote in a letter, were rejecting not God “but the meaning of His creation.”
No modern writer rivals Dostoevsky in the grandeur of his presentation of this eternal Christian dilemma—the fierceness of his attack on the presumed goodness of God, on the one hand, through Ivan Karamazov, and his attempt to counter it with the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor and the preaching of Father Zosima on the other. These pages bring Dostoevsky into the company of Greek and Elizabethan tragedy, and of Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare, rather than of fellow novelists, who rarely venture into such exalted territory. Each of his central figures is elaborated on a richly symbolic scale influenced by some of the greatest works of Western literature, among which his own novel now takes an undisputed place.
The power and pathos of Dostoevsky’s novels and journalism, his impassioned wrestling with the deepest issues confronting Russian society, raised him above the bitter quarrels then taking place and that, just a month after his own death in 1881, led to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. It is no accident that, when he read Pushkin’s poem “The Prophet” in public, as he often did in the last ten years of his life, Dostoevsky was hailed as a prophet himself by enraptured listeners who found solace in his words preaching universal conciliation in the name of Christ. It was also a testimony to his stature that his funeral procession, almost a mile in length, included a vast array of organizations and groups of differing social-political orientations. All of them were united by their admiration for the writer whose works had so illuminated, in such moving and spellbinding forms, the problems assailing all literate Russians in his lifetime, and whose genius had raised their indigenous conflicts to universal heights.
One of Dostoevsky’s dreams for his work had been to bring about the unity of Russian culture; and if he did not succeed during his lifetime, it may be said that he attained this goal with his death. Moreover, the unanimity of esteem felt by Russians at that moment has been continued in the worldwide reverence accorded to his major novels up through our own day.
A few years after the publication of the fifth and final volume of my books on Dostoevsky (2002), the idea was broached of attempting to follow the model provided by Leon Edel with his five-volume work on Henry James. This multi-volumed text, shortened to one, has been highly praised and widely read; and it was suggested by Princeton University Press that perhaps a one-volume condensation of my five, if done properly, would be equally welcomed. At first I encountered such a prospect with some reluctance. The length of my treatment of Dostoevsky was the result of placing his life and writings in the context of a much larger social, historical, and ideological background than had previously been attempted; and I did not wish to lose the new insights that, as I was pleased to see widely acknowledged, this context provided. Moreover, my books contained independent analyses of both his literary and journalistic writings that I wished to remain intact as far as possible. In them I had tried to illuminate Dostoevsky’s unique fusion of the issues of his own life and time with those both of Russian culture as a whole and of the religious-metaphysical “accursed questions” about the meaning of life that had always plagued Western mankind. Hence my hesitation about a one-volume edition; but this was overcome when I was assured that my original volumes would remain in print, and so would be easily available to new readers wishing for a wider horizon.
The decision thus was made to search for an editor to undertake the arduous and taxing task of composing the one-volume manuscript. The choice eventually fell on Mary Petrusewicz, an experienced writer and editor with a PhD degree in Russian literature who taught undergraduate and continuing education courses in the humanities (including courses on Dostoevsky) at Stanford University. Her editorial duties, performed in an exemplary manner after initial consultation for safeguarding what I considered essential, took two years to be completed. I then reviewed the resulting manuscript and made key authorial additions, adjustments, and textual revisions to ensure that this condensed book represented the best and smoothest adaptation of the five previous volumes. She has herself described the principles that guided her excellent work in the Editor’s Note appended to the present book (p. 933) and that, as the reader will see, focuses on what seemed to me of greatest importance—to bring out, as she says, “the full power of Dostoevsky’s texts.”