Dostoevsky (62 page)

The distractions of his renewed social life notwithstanding, Dostoevsky’s energies were focused on reestablishing his literary reputation. All of his time in the spring of 1860 went into planning and drafting two new books, a major novel and the sketches that were to become
Notes from the House of the Dead
. By this time, the planned novel had become essential to fill the obligatory slot reserved for the installment of a major fictional work in every issue of a Russian “thick” monthly. On June 18, Mikhail asked permission of the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee to publish a journal on the basis of the title and program already approved but as a monthly instead of a weekly. The request was approved, and the remainder of the year was occupied by the preparations for publication.

Even aside from the question of a regular income, Dostoevsky was eager to join the journalistic fray. Just a few months earlier,
The Contemporary
had printed Chernyshevsky’s
The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy
, a work destined to become the philosophical bible of the radical generation of the 1860s, and its appearance had blown up a fierce journalistic storm. Chernyshevsky propounds a simple-minded materialism that sees man as being subservient to the laws of nature (as defined in terms of the sciences of the day, particularly chemistry and physiology), a materialism that—as even a commentator sympathetic to the general thrust of his position admits—“left no room for the irreducible and irrational in human behavior, for all those facts where we deal not with things and objects, but with willing and choosing human beings and their relationships. The problem of freedom was Chernyshevsky’s greatest stumbling block, and he would have swept it away into unreality had he not let it reappear by the backstairs in his idea of man as the creator as well as the creature of his environment.”
²

The problem of freedom was indeed one that Chernyshevsky attempted to eradicate, since he did not hesitate to proclaim that nothing such as free will exists, or can exist, as an objective datum. The notion of will or “wanting,” he writes, “is only the subjective impression which accompanies in our minds the rise of thoughts and actions from preceding thoughts, actions or external facts.”
³
As for ethics and morality, Chernyshevsky adopted a form of Benthamite Utilitarianism that rejects all appeal to any kind of traditional (Christian) moral values. Good and evil are defined in terms of “utility,” and man seeks primarily what gives him pleasure and satisfies his egoistic self-interest, but since he is a rational creature, man eventually learns through enlightenment that the most lasting “utility” lies in identifying his own self-interest with that of the majority of his fellows. Once this realization has dawned, the enlightened individual attains the level of a selfishly unselfish “rational egoism,” which, according to Chernyshevsky, is the highest form of human development.

Such conceptions, which spread quickly among the younger generation, provided the philosophical underpinnings for the new morality preached by the radical ideology of the 1860s, and no ideas could have set Dostoevsky’s teeth more on edge. For if he had acquired any new convictions at all during the searing experiences of his last ten years, it was to convince him of two ineluctable truths. One was that the human psyche would never, under any conditions, surrender its desire to assert its freedom; the other was that a Christian morality of love and self-sacrifice was a supreme necessity for both the individual and society. Without these inherited moral values, life among the peasant convicts would have been a literal hell for Dostoevsky, and he shuddered at the thought that it
was precisely
these
values the radicals had now set out to undermine and destroy. An eventual clash with Chernyshevsky and his followers among the generation of the 1860s was thus sooner or later inevitable. This fateful moment, however, did not arrive until several years later, and only after a great deal of social turbulence had ended all hope of accommodation.

Meanwhile, in the fall of 1860, the first two chapters of
House of the Dead
appeared in
The Russian Word
. Difficulties with the censorship then delayed the publication of further installments. In January 1861 the journal reprinted the introduction and first chapter; three more chapters followed at weekly intervals. At the end of January, a continuation of the work was announced, but this promise was never kept, and Dostoevsky’s name abruptly vanished from the list of contributors assembled by the resourceful editor, A. Gieroglifov. The reason, of course, was that the first issue of
Time
appeared at the beginning of the year, and Dostoevsky had no intention of allowing so valuable a literary property to benefit a rival publication.

The announcement of the program of
Time
was sent out in September, and while Dostoevsky’s name could not be displayed because he was an ex-convict, the characteristic stamp of the writer’s fiery temperament would have been immediately apparent in its apocalyptic accents. “We live,” declares the first sentence, “in an epoch in the highest degree remarkable and critical.” Russia is in the midst of a great transformation, and the important social-political changes being awaited, which will finally resolve “the great peasant question,” are only the external symptoms of a more fundamental mutation: “This transformation consists in the fusion of enlightenment, and those who represent it, with the principle of the people’s life, . . . the people who, 170 years ago, recoiled from the Petrine reforms, and since that time, torn away from the educated class, have been living their own separate, isolated, and independent existence” (18: 35).
⁴

Dostoevsky carefully separates his own position from that of both the Slavophils and Westernizers. The people’s rejection of the Petrine reforms, he asserts, was not merely a negation of change and development, as implied by the Slavophils; rather, it had led them to seek change in their own way and on their own terms. Dostoevsky goes back even farther than the reforms of Peter the Great in search of their creativity and finds it in the religious fermentation of the
Raskol
—the refusal of a substantial portion of the population to accept the Greek-inspired reforms of the Russian liturgy—which had led to a schism (
raskol
)
within the Russian Church in the seventeenth century and the proliferation of various dissenting sects of Old Believers. Even though, as Dostoevsky concedes, the results of the schism were “sometimes monstrous” (18: 36), the
raskolniki
nonetheless represented an attempt to create an indigenous Russian culture independent of European influence, and he intimates that the positive values of Russian life for which the upper class was seeking so eagerly could perhaps be found among the dissident sects.

Meanwhile, with equal extremism, the upper class had been assimilating European culture through every pore and moving in exactly the opposite direction. This does not mean, writes Dostoevsky, that in striving to create a truly national culture the upper class will simply renounce everything it has acquired. Indeed, such acquisitions have laid the foundation for the great world-historical role that Russia will be called on to play in the future: “We . . . foresee with reverence . . . that the Russian idea, perhaps, will be the synthesis of all those ideas which Europe had developed, with such persistence and courage, in each of its nationalities; that perhaps everything antagonistic in these ideas will find reconciliation and further development in Russian nationality [
narodnost
’]” (18: 37).

Dostoevsky’s famous doctrine of Russian “pan-humanism” is already expressed here in 1861 in
Time
, and though his views will later take on a more pronounced Slavophil cast, he evaluates even the Russian Westernizers positively, rather than, as the Slavophils were wont to do, as irredeemably corrupted by European influence. Such a comprehensive attitude toward those whom Dostoevsky would later call the “Russian Europeans” will always separate him from the pure Slavophils. The precise lineaments of the Russian culture of the future that Dostoevsky envisages remain obscure; nor will they gain more clarity in his later pronouncements. The emphasis is on the
necessity
of fusion, which Dostoevsky urges in accents that vibrate with the pain of the still-aching scars of his prison years. These memories now lead him to insist that the upper class must undertake “the spread of enlightenment, energetically, quickly, and at whatever cost—this is the major problem of our time, the first step toward every activity” (18: 37).

The journals of the Dostoevsky brothers, first
Time
and then its successor
Epoch
(
Epokha
), have thus taken their place in Russian literature as the mouthpieces of an independent social-cultural tendency called
pochvennichestvo
.
⁵
The
pochvenniki
believed in the primacy of helping to forward a new Russian cultural synthesis from the fusion of the people and their cultivated superiors. For the
radical intelligentsia, on the other hand, all other issues were secondary to that of improving the lot of the peasantry in the manner they considered most consistent with social justice. The program of
Time
was broad enough and vague enough, however, to appeal to a large spectrum of opinion among the intelligentsia; and the slogan of
pochvennichestvo
, given the influence of Herzen’s ideas, did not have any particularly compromising connotations in the eyes of the radicals at that moment.
Time
was initially considered to be just another progressive journal, with what would be called, at the end of the decade, a pronounced Populist (
narodny
) slant.

However, Dostoevsky had also recruited Nikolay Strakhov and Apollon Grigoryev as his two leading contributors, knowing that both were firmly opposed to many aspects of the radical ideology of the 1860s. Strakhov, who was to become an intimate friend of Tolstoy as well as Dostoevsky, was then at the start of a notable career as critic and publicist—a career during which he would advocate philosophical Idealism and defend a moderately Slavophil and eventually pan-Slavic social-political position. Like many of the radicals he was to confront in print, Strakhov was the son of a priestly family and had been educated in a seminary. Unlike his opponents, he had later studied mathematics and natural science and had taken an advanced university degree in biology. Such qualifications gave him a scientific competence far superior to that of the average Russian publicist, and he combined these credentials with a devotion to Hegel and German Idealism that made him acutely aware of the limitations of scientific knowledge when confronted with the eternal “accursed questions” of human existence.

Strakhov first attracted Dostoevsky’s attention through articles he had printed in the journal
The Torch
: a series on science called
Letters about Life
and a review of P. L. Lavrov’s recent
Studies on the Question of Practical Philosophy
. Lavrov, who would soon emerge as a leading spokesman for the ideology of the Russian Populists, had been attacked by Chernyshevsky for not being a vigorous enough materialist, and Lavrov’s book had then been used as the pretext to develop his own ideas in
The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy
. Strakhov, on the contrary, found Lavrov too much of a materialist for his taste, and launched a counterattack in defense of human freedom and moral autonomy against all attempts to make them subservient to material conditions. “The will,” Strakhov declared, “is subordinate, in an essential and necessary fashion, to one thing only—the idea of its own freedom, the idea of its independent, original and conscious self-determination.”
⁶

Strakhov possessed an impressive culture and professional mastery to which Dostoevsky could not pretend, and their daily conversations sharpened the novelist’s awareness of the implications of his own views. “Our conversations were endless,” Strakhov writes, “and they were the best conversations I was ever lucky enough to have in my life.” What captivated him about Dostoevsky was “his unusual mind, the speed with which he seized on every idea after just a simple word or allusion.” Strakhov also noted another trait of Dostoevsky’s intellectual physiognomy that has particular relevance for the ideological character of his great creations. “He was . . . 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. Above all, he was an artist, he thought in images and was guided by feeling.”
⁷