Dostoevsky (66 page)

Part of
Time
’s considerable success was attributable to Dostoevsky’s flair for providing his readers with exciting literary sustenance from a great range of sources. At the same time, what he chose to print bears the inevitable mark of his own preoccupations, and his editorial comments often foreshadow his later works or illuminate the manner in which everything he read became grist for his creative mill.

During 1861,
Time
ran a series of accounts of famous recent murder trials in France. These are recommended as irresistible reading, “more exciting than all possible novels because they light up the dark sides of the human soul that art does not like to approach, or which it approaches only glancingly and in passing” (19: 89). What interests Dostoevsky are the psychological motives and behavior of those who kill. With such words, Dostoevsky is anticipatorily staking out the novelistic domain in which he will soon achieve his greatest triumphs. For he will raise the novel of mystery and criminal adventures to new heights by shifting the focus from such external plot action to the psychology (which for him will be inseparable from the ideology) of the criminal.

A lengthy preface in the first issue preceded three stories by Edgar Allen Poe, and both Dostoevsky’s text and the translations can be linked closely with his creations in the next few years. Dostoevsky’s preface, in the words of a Soviet Russian scholar, contains “the first serious and penetrating evaluation of the American writer made in Russia” (19: 282). Indeed, according to an American specialist, Dostoevsky’s preface of 1860 includes “the most perceptive observations yet made in any language specifically on Poe’s artistic technique.”
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What struck Dostoevsky in Poe was “the vigor of his imagination,” which he defines as “the power of specific detail”: Poe will invent the most extraordinary and even impossible situations, but in his stories “you will so clearly see all the details of the form of the existence presented to you” that the reader is absolutely convinced of their verisimilitude. Unlike Baudelaire, whose translations of Poe (including the prefatory essays) Dostoevsky had certainly read, he does not view him as a
poète maudit
condemned by the reigning vulgarity of American life; rather, he suggests quite brilliantly that the outstanding feature of Poe’s imagination
is typically American. Materialism was presumed to be the dominating aspect of American civilization, and “if there is the fantastic in Poe, it has, so to speak, something material about it. Clearly, he is fully an American even in his most fantastic stories” (19: 88–89).

The stories of Poe that Dostoevsky printed can all be related to the two great works he will write in just a few years—
Notes from Underground
and
Crime and Punishment
. Even the least of Poe’s stories in
Time
—“The Devil in the Belfry,” hardly more than a broad comic anecdote—is an allegory of the intrusion of the irrational into an orderly world that has always run in accordance with its immutable laws. When the devil gets into the belfry of the sleepy town of Vondervotteimittis, the lives of the sedate burghers are thrown completely out of kilter because the belfry clock at noontime does not stop at twelve but goes on to chime thirteen. The two other stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” contain features that can be linked even more concretely with Dostoevsky’s artistic future.

Both are written in a first-person mode by a narrator unable to suppress a sense of guilt about his crimes and whose conscience finally bursts forth in self-betrayal. Both also illustrate the same irresistible pressure of the irrational to thwart the best-laid and most cunning calculations of the rational mind. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a motiveless murderer who kills because of a pathological obsession, believes he has committed the perfect crime, but he finally confesses because he thinks that others as well as himself hear the thunderous noise of the victim’s heart continuing to beat through the floor under which the corpse lies buried.

“The Black Cat” is also the story of a crime executed in secret and ultimately discovered because of an oversight caused by panic and terror. Above all, “The Black Cat” contains the narrator’s comment on his inexplicable sadism toward the cat he supposedly loves. Such behavior is attributable to “the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which gives direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should
not
? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?”
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This passage may surely be seen as one of the sources leading to the philosophical-psychological dialectic of the first part of
Notes from Underground
.

Yet, for all his admiration of Poe’s talent, Dostoevsky does not consider him the equal of another “fantasist,” E.T.A. Hoffmann, whom Dostoevsky had read as an adolescent with reverence. What gives Hoffmann the upper hand, he maintains, is that the supernatural and unearthly interpenetrate and fuse in his work with the commonplace and the verisimilar. Sometimes Hoffmann “even seeks his ideal outside the earthly, in some sort of extraordinary world that he accepts as superior, as if he himself believed in the existence of this mysterious enchanted world.” Poe is inferior to Hoffmann as a “poet,” since the German Romantic constantly infuses his work with aspiration toward “an ideal”—and in such aspiration Dostoevsky locates “the purity, and the real, true beauty inherent in man” (19: 88–89). Dostoevsky’s own best post-Siberian creations attempt to strike a balance between the two writers, rivaling Poe for vividness and verisimilitude but never losing Hoffmann’s sense of the unearthly and the transcendent as a controlling force in human life.

Dostoevsky thus tried to be both a writer like Poe and a poet like Hoffmann; for him these two aspects of literature should not ever be separated. Indeed, the necessity of keeping the two united was an issue very much on his mind precisely at this moment, and it was one that continued to preoccupy his thinking about art and life. For the most important function of art, he believed, was to inspire man by providing him with an ideal of transcendence toward which he could eternally aspire. This was the very position he asserted when, in the second number of
Time
, he launched his first open attack against the radical camp.

At first sight, Dostoevsky’s article, “Mr.—bov and the Question of Art,” appears to be only a response to a recent article of Dobrolyubov devoted to the stories of the Ukrainian-Russian author Maria Markovich, who wrote under the pseudonym of Marco Vovchok. In reality, however, Dostoevsky’s article contains the results of long meditations on the question of art that extend from the beginning of his literary career through his Siberian years.

During the mid-1840s, Dostoevsky had disagreed with Belinsky over the social function of art and had argued that the artist should be accorded absolute freedom. Several years later, exactly the position that Dostoevsky had rejected as a young writer was codified into an influential theory by Chernyshevsky in
The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality
. Artists, insisted the radical critic, had the obligation to subordinate their inspiration to “life,” and “life” was defined essentially in terms of the immediate task of obtaining social justice. Chernyshevsky’s ideas stirred up a huge controversy in Russian criticism, which then became stylized into an opposition between Gogol and Pushkin. The first was elevated by the radicals into an exemplar of what they wished literature to be, an accusation and exposé of the evils of Russian society; the second was celebrated by their opponents
as the image of the serene Olympian dedicating his divine gifts to the “eternal” entanglements of the human condition. Both were praised and denounced with equal fervor and equal lack of discrimination, and Dobrolyubov particularly enjoyed heaping scorn on what he called Pushkin’s “anthology-pieces” and “toy rattles.”
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All this began during Dostoevsky’s years in prison camp, but he caught up with the polemic once he emerged and began to read the periodicals. Indeed, since he then started to work on a series of essays titled
Letters on Art
, whose subject would have been “the significance of Christianity in art,”
⁵
there is evidence that he wished to add his own voice to the raging debate. This work, if ever written, has not survived; but some glimpse of its ideas may surely be obtained in the article “Mr.—bov and the Question of Art.”

In line with the general policy of
Time
, Dostoevsky tries to dissociate his polemic from any invidious personal connotations, and he praises Dobrolyubov as being “almost the only one of our critics who is now being read” (18: 72). At the same time, Dostoevsky also tries to cover his flanks with a broadside against one of the bulwarks of the “Pushkinian” camp, the
Notes of the Fatherland
, and by defending the importance of Belinsky against a deprecating reference to the critic as not having given enough importance to the “historical” study of Russian literature. “In two pages of Belinsky,” Dostoevsky retorts, “. . . more is said about the historical aspect of Russian literature than in all the pages of the
Notes of the Fatherland
from 1848 up to the present” (18: 71). No quarter is given to the critic of that journal, S. S. Dudyshkin, who might have been considered one of his allies against Dobrolyubov. Dostoevsky thus publicly aligns himself with the radicals, for whom Belinsky was an unsurpassable master, and establishes his credentials as a nonpartisan commentator who, even if picking a quarrel with Dobrolyubov, can hardly be considered to belong to the party of the enemy.

To begin, Dostoevsky sets the two extreme positions in confrontation with each other and demonstrates that both are self-contradictory. The partisans of the freedom of art, who do not tolerate constraints and directives, at the same time object to “accusatory” literature and its themes. As a result, they infringe the very principle of the freedom of art they presumably wish to defend. The radical Utilitarians demand that art be useful, but, since they are indifferent to artistic quality, they too find themselves in contradiction with their own leading principle: “A work without artistic value can never and in no way attain its goal; moreover, it does more harm than good to its cause; hence the Utilitarians, in neglecting artistic value, are the first to harm their own cause” (18: 79).

Even though both poles are thus rejected as being internally inconsistent, it is obvious that Dostoevsky believes the mistake of the partisans of art to be only a venial sin, while that of the Utilitarians implies a denial of the very right of art to exist. It is true, Dostoevsky acknowledges, that Dobrolyubov does not specifically go to such lengths, but Chernyshevsky
had
, after all, compared art to school texts whose “purpose is to prepare the student for reading the original sources and later to serve as reference books from time to time.”
⁶
And even if the Utilitarians do not openly reject art, they not only hold it in very low esteem but seem to resent artistic quality as such; if not, why do they “detest Pushkin, and label all his inspiration as affectations, grimaces, hocus-pocus and grace-notes, while his poems are considered trifles fit only for anthologies?” (18: 79).

As proof of the ultimate contempt of the Utilitarians for art, Dostoevsky singles out Dobrolyubov’s praise of Marco Vovchok. Dostoevsky concentrates his fire on one of her stories, “Masha,” which portrays the inner resistance of a young serf girl to her enslaved condition. For Dobrolyubov, this story illustrated the depth of the Russian common people’s longing for freedom; it stood as a lesson for all those who believed that the Russian peasant was too undeveloped as an individual to harbor any desire for emancipation. In words that startlingly anticipate those Dostoevsky will soon use in
House of the Dead
, he writes: “the strength which lies in them [the Russian common people], finding no free and proper outlet, is compelled to force an unconventional way for itself . . . often in a way fatal to itself.”
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