Dostoevsky (31 page)

To consider Christ the greatest moral revolutionary of all times—a sublime paradigm for all the lesser ones who follow in his wake—was of course to flaunt the banner of moral-religious Socialism in the face of those rallying to another standard. The idea of Christ as revolutionary was standard in the 1840s, but to view Christ as the divine harbinger of man’s (moral-psychological) freedom from the shackles of historical determinism was much less conventional. There can be little doubt that Dostoevsky’s own idea of Christ was profoundly affected by Maikov’s Utopian Socialist icon, and that Christ for him would always
remain not only the traditional Savior from the bonds of sin and death but also the sacred pledge of the possibility of moral freedom.

Maikov’s article also reveals how insistently the issue of free will and moral responsibility had already begun to gnaw at those who, like Dostoevsky, refused to surrender the moral-religious basis of their progressivism. For it was by no means a simple matter to believe in the moral power of the personality as the appalling evidence piled up of the human ravages of early capitalism. Even Maikov could not help admitting that it was “stupid and vile” to preach morality to the exploited lower classes. But this did not lead him to deny the
possibility
of free will and moral responsibility, even though he agreed that “only heroism can unite moral worth with poverty.”
¹³
Such “heroism,” nonetheless, exists; the human personality will never allow itself to be completely subjugated by material conditions. The same inner debate already adumbrated in Maikov’s essays will later be passionately argued in Dostoevsky’s pages. Twenty years later, when Dostoevsky began to break with radicalism entirely, the tendencies evident in the later Belinsky had hardened into dogma, and it was impossible any longer to be a radical and to continue to affirm the existence of free will.

Still another side of Maikov’s thought helps to throw additional light on Dostoevsky. Man, Maikov writes, using Fourier’s terminology, “is endowed with virtues, that is, needs and capabilities that make up his vitality . . . [and] the source of everything vicious . . . [is] . . . the clash between his . . . powers and external circumstances, which create a disharmony between them.”
¹⁴
Human nature is thus essentially good, and evil is the result of the arrangements of society that do not allow mankind properly to satisfy its needs and capabilities. Maikov, however, uses this Fourierist view of human nature to undermine the assumption that “nationality” is a positive value. National traits of character, Maikov argues, are the product of the drives built into the human psyche as they objectify themselves in one direction or another under the influence of material conditions (climate, geography, race, history). But the universal human ideal is “the harmonious development of all human needs and their corresponding capacities.”
¹⁵
Judged by this ideal, all national attributes—even those ordinarily considered to be virtues—are really defects or vices: they are one-sided and unbalanced, and distort human nature in its full plenitude. Such a forthright rejection of nationality was by no means uncommon as a by-product of progressive Western Utopian Socialist influence.

Belinsky thrived on polemics and was at his best when aroused to a fighting fury. He replied to Maikov’s onslaught in the winter of 1846 with his famous
A View
of Russian Literature of 1846
, which contained the fateful article that certified the total shipwreck of Dostoevsky’s literary reputation and his public repudiation by the critic who had raised him to fame. One suspects that Dostoevsky’s well-known friendship with Maikov may have had something to do with the new severity of Belinsky’s judgment. For it was not Dostoevsky alone who received the back of Belinsky’s hand; anyone else known to have been allied with Maikov, or whose work Maikov had praised, is also treated harshly. Poor, inoffensive Pleshcheev was caught in the cross fire and contemptuously dismissed as vainly pretending to a nonexistent literary talent; although not a major poet, his humanitarian themes would have elicited a word of sympathy under other circumstances.

Belinsky’s answer to Maikov is a curious and contradictory mixture of Littré and Hegel, which never really grapples with the moral-religious basis of Maikov’s progressive Westernism. What is new, however, is Belinsky’s vehement affirmation and defense of nationality against Maikov’s deprecation. Up to this time, it was Belinsky who had led the assault against the Slavophil idealization of Russian national virtues
as embodied in the backward and illiterate peasantry
. But now, as if in deliberate opposition to Maikov, Belinsky declares that “on this subject [nationality] I am rather inclined to side with the Slavophils rather than to remain on the side of the humanistic cosmopolitans.”
¹⁶
And Belinsky’s sensational about-face acted as a catalyst to spur on the ideological fusion between the two camps—the “backward-looking” Slavophils and the progressive Westernizers—begun a few years earlier, and soon to produce the various varieties of Russian Populism that dominated Russian culture until the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, much of what Belinsky says about nationality in this article turns up in the later journalism of Dostoevsky almost word for word. Like Belinsky, and in opposition to the Slavophils, Dostoevsy would always refuse to glamorize the Russian past or to dream of the restoration of some sort of Arcadian, pre-Petrine world, but like Belinsky again he wholeheartedly shared the Slavophil criticism of “Russian Europeanism.” Belinsky noted that this automatic and demeaning aping of European civilization had created “a sort of duality in Russian life, consequently a lack of moral unity.” Would Dostoevsky not later see himself precisely as the chronicler of this “lack of moral unity” in Russian life? Moreover, for Dostoevsky too the remedy would be not to reject Europe and return to the past (an impossible task in any case) but to realize that “Russia had fully outlived the epoch of reformation, that the reforms had done their business . . . and that the time had come for Russia to develop independently from out of herself.”
¹⁷
Belinsky here is talking about the reforms of Peter the Great, and Dostoevsky would repeat exactly the same argument about those instituted by Alexander II in the early 1860s.

Russian nationality is no longer to be disparaged; on the contrary, as the Slavophils argued, it was to become the principle on which the Russia of the future was to be founded. But this made the task of defining such a principle all the more pressing. The Slavophils believed that Russia differed from Europe because its own history had been marked by peaceful Christian concord rather than by the egoistic struggles for power between classes and nations so typical of Western rivalries. But Belinsky disdainfully sweeps aside the idea that Russian nationality can be identified with the principle of love and humility. Instead, the “versatility” of the Russian character, its seeming amorphousness and unprecedented ability to assimilate and absorb alien cultures, plays a predominant role. This capacity may seem like weakness at first sight, but to a mind schooled in Schelling and Hegel and nurtured on the messianic speculations of Romantic nationalism, it is child’s play to extract the positive from the negative. For the extreme malleability of the Russian folk-psyche may be “ascribed to natural giftedness,” and may be the source of future strength. It may mean that “the Russian nationality is foreordained to express the richest and most many-sided essence in its nationality.”
¹⁸

Such ideas would have been familiar to Dostoevsky from the violent nationalism of Belinsky’s essays during his Hegelian phase; and the vision of Russia as charged with a world-historical mission to synthesize the conflicting national cultures of Europe had been much in the air since the 1820s. But such ideas were given a new vitality when Belinsky used them to rebut Maikov’s “cosmopolitanism” in the 1840s. For in freeing the idea of “nationality” from the negative and limiting connotations given it by Maikov, he adroitly turned it toward a universalism that rescued patriotic emotion from the Slavophils and reconciled them with progressive Westernism. This is the same vision of Russia as the future creator of a pan-human world culture that we shall find evoked so eloquently by Dostoevsky, and it will be supported by exactly the same arguments—the ease with which Russians learn foreign languages, their ability to identify with alien cultures, the role of Russian literature as a precursor of the new world synthesis. To these, of course, Dostoevsky will add the Russian Christ as the divine warrant of moral freedom and the triumph of human liberty over the laws of nature. In such a perspective, his post-Siberian “Slavophil” ideology may thus be seen as an amalgam of ideas whose roots go back both to Belinsky and to Valerian Maikov.

Such lines of continuity help to restore the true historical picture that Dostoevsky himself did so much to blur. For the moment, though, let us note only
the general tenor of Belinsky’s article. “Europe today is engrossed with great new problems . . . but . . . it would be quite futile to treat these problems as our own. . . . We ourselves, in ourselves, and around ourselves—that is where we should seek both the problems and their solutions.”
¹⁹
These words translate the mood of Belinsky’s disillusionment with Utopian Socialism, but even those who still clung to some remnant of Utopian Socialist hopes now began to reinterpret and to readapt them in terms of Russian social problems.

The spring of 1847 was an extremely difficult period in Dostoevsky’s life. The final split between him and Belinsky occurred sometime between the beginning of the year and early spring. What he himself called “the dissolution of my fame in the journals” was proceeding apace, and he informs Mikhail that his funds are so low that “if there had not been some kind people, I would have gone under.”
²⁰
Only Valerian Maikov was left to afford him some comfort, but the young Maikov lacked Belinsky’s authority, and his praise could not offset the older critic’s condemnation.

Dostoevsky moved to new quarters in the early spring of 1847 and began to live a lonely, bachelor existence. It must have been about this time that he organized dinners on a cooperative basis for the people he knew best—Pleshcheev, the two Maikov brothers, Dr. Yanovsky, the minor writer Yakov Butkov; somewhat later, the schoolteacher and critic Alexander Milyukov, whose memoirs of Dostoevsky are quite valuable. These dinners were held in the Hôtel de France, reputed for its cuisine and located on the avenue where Dostoevsky now lived, and he took a great deal of pleasure, according to Yanovsky, in arranging such convivial occasions. He knew the importance of maintaining a psychic balance between the external and the internal, and was fearful of “nerves and fantasy” obtaining the upper hand in his own life. No doubt it was partly to counteract his new isolation that he now began to frequent the gatherings of the Petrashevsky Circle.

This was Dostoevsky’s first encounter with the figure whose eccentricities had already made his name a byword in Petersburg. In 1847, Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevsky was a young man of twenty-six, the same age as Dostoevsky. Educated in the Alexander Lyceum at Tsarskoe-Selo—the most exclusive school in Russia for children of the nobility—he had acquired a reputation even there for refractoriness and opposition to authority. Barely managing to graduate, he obtained a post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a translator, and continued his studies by acquiring a diploma in law at the University of St. Petersburg. Petrashevsky,
however, also attended the courses in political economy given by V. S. Poroshin, who lectured on the various new Socialist systems. This initiation into Socialist ideas influenced him strongly, just as it had influenced others—Valerian Maikov among them—who had sat in Poroshin’s classroom. Fourierism in particular made a great impression on Petrashevsky, and he devoted himself to propagating his new faith.