Dostoevsky (60 page)

The verse, taken from a poem by Nekrasov, celebrates the magnanimity of a high-minded “progressive” lover who, having risen above social prejudice, “redeems” a prostitute by making her his wife. By this time, the narrator regards the words of Colonel Rostanev as typical of the indiscriminately benevolent attitude represented by the poem—the very same attitude he has just managed to slough off himself. He thus cites the poem ironically, as a notorious expression of such well-meant but naïve illusions. The Colonel, though, in his entire innocence, takes the narrator’s words at face value; but what he says, in supposed agreement, differs significantly from the narrator’s progressive litany. “ ‘My dear, my dear,’ he said, much touched, ‘you understand me fully, and have said much better than I could what I wanted to express: Yes, yes! Good heaven! Why is it man is wicked? Why is it I am so often wicked when it is so splendid, so fine to be good’ ” (3: 161).

Dostoevsky, it seems to me, wishes the reader now to feel a distinct difference between the effusions of the Colonel and the narrator’s tongue-in-cheek recital of his benevolent commonplaces, which have already been exploded in the main action involving Foma. What separates the two attitudes is that, in the Colonel’s case, his spontaneous sympathy with his fellow man immediately involves a sense of his own weakness and human fallibility. Nothing of the kind can be seen in the humanitarianism of the Natural School, which contains, on the contrary, a latent self-complacency, an implicit posture of superiority to and patronage of the “fallen,” who must of course be “sought out and raised up.”

In the brief epilogue, Dostoevsky comments on the same altruistic position as exhibited by Nastenka. It is she who keeps Foma in check after her marriage with the Colonel, but the narrator remarks that she nonetheless forgave Foma because of her happiness, “and what is more, I believe she seriously with all her heart entered into my uncle’s idea that too much must not be expected from a ‘victim’ who had once been a buffoon, but on the contrary, balm must be poured on his wounded heart. Poor Nastenka had herself been one of the
humiliated
, she had suffered and she remembered it” (3: 164). Once again Dostoevsky emphasizes the personal sense of identification with the victim or sufferer—a compassion springing not from any theoretical doctrine of social pity, with its implied sense of distance and hierarchy, but out of a frame of mind and heart placing the forgiver on exactly the same moral-human level as the forgiven.

Erich Auerbach has remarked that Russian Realism, unlike the other European literatures of the nineteenth century, “is based on a Christian and traditionally patriarchal concept of the creatural dignity of every human individual regardless of social rank and position” and “is fundamentally related to
old-Christian rather than to modern occidental realism.”
²³
In
The Village of Stepanchikovo
, we can catch Dostoevsky in the process of discarding his Western-oriented beliefs of the 1840s or, more exactly, transforming the predominantly social emphasis of his earlier commitments to Christian values into one inclining toward a more traditional Christian sense of universal moral culpability and responsibility for evil and sin. It is only a love for one’s fellow man springing from such a sense, we may interpret him as saying, that can escape the onus of pharisaical pride and insulting condescension and both judges and pardons at the same time.

¹
Pis’ma
1: 221–222; June 1, 1857.

²
Ibid., 2: 585–586; November 3, 1857.

³
Ibid., 1: 236; May 31, 1858.

⁴
Ibid., 2: 593; September 13, 1858.

⁵
Ibid., 594–595; December 13, 1858.

⁶
Ibid., 594.

⁷
Ibid., 593.

⁸
Ibid., 1: 246.

⁹
Ibid., 251; September 13, 1858.

¹⁰
Ibid., 252; September 19, 1859.

¹¹
DVS
, 1: 323.

¹²
Pis’ma
, 1: 264; October 11, 1859.

¹³
“Pis’ma M. M. Dostoevskogo k F. M. Dostoevskomu,” in
DMI
, 525; October 21, 1859.

¹⁴
L. P. Grossman, “Derevnya Dostoevskogo,” in
F. M. Dostoevsky
, Selo Stepanchikovo
i ego obitateli
(Moscow, 1935), 28.

¹⁵
Cited in
PSS
, 3: 505.

¹⁶
L. P. Grossman, “Dostoevsky—khudozhnik,” in
Tvorchestvo F. M. Dostoevskogo
(Moscow, 1959), 344–348.

¹⁷
Traces of the original play form are still evident in
Uncle’s Dream
, especially at the beginning of
Chapter 3
, which describes the characters as part of the stage scenery. “Ten o’clock in the morning. We are in Marya Alexandrovna’s house in the main street, in the very room which the lady of the house calls her
salon
. . . . In this
salon
there are well-painted floors, and rather nice wall-papers that were ordered expressly for the walls. In the rather clumsy furniture red is the predominating color. There is an open fireplace, over the mantelpiece a mirror, before the looking-glass a bronze clock with a Cupid on it in very bad taste” (2: 303). What we have are probably the remains of an intermediate draft halfway between stage directions and narrative. The chapter begins in the present tense and then shifts, with no explanation, into the narrative past, as if Dostoevsky at this point were uncertain exactly how to handle the transition from the dramatic present of the play form to narrative.

¹⁸
Pis’ma
, 3: 85–86; September 14, 1873.

¹⁹
Ibid., 1: 246; May 9, 1859.

²⁰
See Thomas Mann, “Dostoevsky—in Moderation,” published as the preface to
The Short Novels of Dostoevsky
, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, 1945), xvii. The German text is included in Thomas Mann,
Neue Studien
(Stockholm, 1948).

²¹
See “Neizdanny Dostoevsky,”
LN
83 (Moscow, 1971), 607.

²²
Besides the underground man and, in Colonel Rostanev, the future idiot, we also catch a prefiguration of Raskolnikov in one of the subplots. A seedy young fortune hunter, a cultivated but more craven variation of the Foma type, persuades Tatyana Ivanovna into a runaway elopement. When caught red-handed and stopped in the nick of time, the culprit turns out to be a Raskolnikov
avant la lettre
, who pleads that he was not inspired by “mercenary motives.” “I should have used the money usefully,” he babbles. “I should have helped the poor. I wanted to support the movement for enlightenment, too, and even dreamed of endowing a university scholarship” (2: 123).

²³
Erich Auerbach,
Mimesis
, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 521.

The publication of Dostoevsky’s two Siberian novellas marks the end of his artistic exile and the beginning of his return to the center of Russian cultural life. These works appeared in print during 1859, and at the very end of this year, in mid-December, Dostoevsky finally realized his long-awaited dream of returning to St. Petersburg. This homecoming, however, did not take place all at once; even after arriving in European Russia, he was forced to stagnate for a few months in Tver, a city on the railroad line between Petersburg and Moscow. The Ministry of War had denied him the right to live in either of the two cities where he could obtain competent medical treatment, advising him to ask for authorization from the tsar through the Third Section.

Early in July 1859, Dostoevsky began the journey from Siberia to European Russia, which took about a month and a half and again involved a huge sum of money, which he scraped together with the help of a loan from Pleshcheev. The party paused at Omsk for a few days to pick up Pasha Isaev, who had been withdrawn from the Siberian Cadet Corps. A moving moment occurred when Dostoevsky’s
tarantas
, rolling through the Ural Mountains, reached the frontier between Asia and Europe. Ten years before, a prisoner in shackles, Dostoevsky had passed this frontier in the midst of a howling snowstorm; now it was a fine summer afternoon when they stumbled on “the handsome column with an inscription, and beside it, in an
izba
, an invalid [a wounded veteran acting as caretaker]. We got out of the
tarantas
, and I crossed myself; God, at last, had led me to see the Promised Land. Then we took out our plated flask full of a tangy wild-orange brandy . . . and we drank our good-bye to Asia with the invalid; Nikolaev [the guide] also drank and the coachman too (and how he drove afterwards).”
¹

Much of Dostoevsky’s energies during the months passed in Tver were taken up with negotiations over his permission to move to Petersburg, but as a self-described “literary proletarian”
²
whose only source of livelihood was his pen, he was constantly turning over ideas for new works and calculating the possibilities
of squeezing a little more out of his past publications. Although Mikhail supplied him with funds, and even with indispensable clothing (not to mention a new fur hat for Marya Dimitrievna), Dostoevsky was painfully aware that his brother could not long continue to support such a financial burden.

Dostoevsky, however, had no intention of resting on his laurels, especially since he was aware that those he had acquired in the past had become almost invisible in the eyes of a new generation of readers. Now that his two novellas were out of the way, we find him juggling with a baffling variety of literary projects whose relation to what he actually wrote remains, except in a few instances, extremely conjectural. From Dostoevsky’s letters, we gather that he was worried about the lack of “the passionate element” in
The Village of Stepanchikovo
(as compared with Turgenev’s
A Nest of Gentlefolk
), but his ambition to emulate Turgenev was soon swept aside by other plans that he excitedly announces to Mikhail as “definitive,” only to sweep them away a few days later for still others. What he wished to hit upon, and desperately needed to find, was an idea that would be certain to create a genuine literary sensation and to attract the public attention that would raise his prestige and financial value.

On October 9, he announces to Mikhail that he has firmly decided to undertake writing the future
House of the Dead
at once—a project that would allow him to take advantage of the sympathy inspired in the reading public by a returning political exile. Dostoevsky writes of “the depiction of characters
unheard of
previously in literature, and the touching, and finally the most important—my name. Remember that Pleshcheev attributed the success of his poems to his name (do you understand?). I am convinced that the public will read this with avidity.”
³

Dostoevsky’s letters also disclose a dialogue being carried on between the two brothers over a joint literary venture. So far, we have seen Mikhail Dostoevsky only as an ex-journalist and minor short-story writer turned cigarette manufacturer, who, out of the goodness of his heart, had supplied his more gifted brother with funds and acted as his literary agent. His cigarette business, however, was a very small affair, largely dependent on the labor of his family. Mikhail had given up literature only as a result of the direst necessity and had never abandoned the idea of returning to it one day. The new atmosphere in Russia now enabled Mikhail to realize his dream. “Here in Petersburg,” the liberal historian K. D. Kavelin wrote at the beginning of 1856, “it is impossible any longer to recognize the [previous] caravansary of militarism, the cudgel, and benightedness. Everything is talked about, . . . sometimes stupidly, but all the same discussed and, as a result of this, studied.”
⁴
Under the impetus of this heady sense of freedom, 150 new newspapers and journals were started in Russia between 1856 and 1860, and
on June 19, 1858, Mikhail submitted to the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee a plan for a weekly “political and literary” periodical to be entitled
Time
(
Vremya
). Permission to publish such a journal was granted at the end of October 1858, and the censor appointed to oversee it was none other than the novelist Ivan Goncharov.

A month after Mikhail submitted his proposal, he explained what he had in mind to his brother; and Feodor replied with enthusiasm: “Most important: a literary feuilleton, a critical review of the journals . . . enmity toward the
mutual back-scratching
now so widespread, more energy, fire, sharpness of mind, firmness—that’s what we need now! . . . I have written down and sketched out several literary essays along these lines: for instance,
on contemporary poets
, on the
statistical tendency
in literature, on the uselessness of
tendencies
in art—essays written heatedly and even cuttingly, but, most important, readably.”
⁵

Several more years were to pass, however, before Dostoevsky had the opportunity to express such opinions in print. Nothing was done by Mikhail, probably for financial reasons, to get his new publication under way in 1858, and 1859 found it still in the planning stage. “Look at others, neither talents nor abilities, and yet they rise in the world, amass a capital,” Dostoevsky writes disconsolately in November 1859. “I am convinced . . . that you and I are much cleverer, more capable, and knowledgeable about affairs than Kraevsky and Nekrasov. Why, they are just peasants about literature. And yet they get rich, and we are strapped for cash. . . . No brother . . . it’s necessary to take a risk and engage in some literary enterprise—a journal, for example.”
⁶
Dostoevsky was now thinking not of a weekly periodical (
gazeta
) but of a monthly “thick” journal (
zhurnal
) that would compete with those of Kraevsky and Nekrasov.