Dostoevsky (78 page)

After their week in Florence together the two men parted company, Strakhov going on to Paris and Dostoevsky intending to journey south to Rome and Naples. For unknown reasons he changed his mind and by the beginning of September was back in Petersburg ready to take up his post again as de facto editor and chief contributor to
Time
.

¹
Cited in
Istoriya Russkoi literatury XIX v
., ed. N. D. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1915), 3: 45.

²
B. Eikhenbaum,
Lev Tolstoy
, vol. 1 (Leningrad, 1928), 223–224.

³
I. S. Turgenev,
Literary Reminiscences
, trans. David Magarshack (New York, 1958), 194.

⁴
Alexander Herzen,
My Past and Thoughts
, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Humphrey Higgins, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 4: 1574–1584.

⁵
Ibid.

⁶
I. S. Turgenev,
Pis’ma
, 13 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1961), 4: 303.

⁷
G. M. Fridlender et al.,
Istoriya Russkogo romana
, 2 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1962), 1: 501.

⁸
See, for example, the remark in Pisarev’s essay “Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism” (1861) that “the Russian peasant has perhaps not yet acquired sufficient stature to realize his own personality and rise to a reasonable egoism and respect for his own individuality” (or, more literally, his own
I
). Dimitry Pisarev,
Selected Philosophical, Social and Political Essays
(Moscow, 1958), 77.

⁹
Cited in V. E. Evgenyev-Maximov, Sovremennik
pri Chernyshevskom i Dobrolyubove
(Leningrad, 1936), 514.

¹⁰
P. V. Annenkov,
Literaturnye vospominaniya
(St. Petersburg, 1909), 549–550.

¹¹
Evgenyev-Maximov,
Sovremennik
, 548.

¹²
D. I. Pisarev,
Sochineniya
, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1955), 2: 8–9, 10–11.

¹³
Ibid., 11, 10.

¹⁴
Ibid., 15.

¹⁵
Turgenev,
Pis’ma
, 4: 358–359.

¹⁶
Ibid., 385.

¹⁷
Nikolay Strakhov,
Kriticheskiya stat’i
, 2 vols. (Kiev, 1902–1908), 1: 201.

¹⁸
Ibid., 37.

¹⁹
Biografiya
, 237.

²⁰
Pis’ma
, 1: 302; July 31, 1861.

²¹
Biografiya
, 259.

²²
DMI
, 536.

²³
Ibid., 310; June 6/July 8, 1862.

²⁴
“The bourgeois,” writes Herzen, “weeps in the theatre, moved by his own virtue as portrayed by Scribe, moved by his mercantile heroism and the poetry of shopkeeping.” Cited in A. S. Dolinin, “Dostoevsky i Gertsen,”
Poslednie romany Dostoevskogo
(Moscow–Leningrad, 1963), 220–221.

²⁵
A. I. Gertsen,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
, 30 vols. (Moscow, 1954–1966), 26: 203–204.

²⁶
Ibid., 27: 247.

²⁷
G. F. Kogan, “Razyskaniya o Dostoevskom,”
LN
86 (Moscow, 1973), 596.

²⁸
L. P. Grossman and Vyacheslav Polonsky,
Spor o Bakunine i Dostoevskom
(Moscow, 1926). For a witty summing up of the opposing arguments, which concludes that Grossman’s thesis is a myth, see Jacques Catteau, “Bakounine et Dostoevski,” in
Bakounine: Combats et débats
(Paris, 1979), 97–105.

²⁹
Kogan, “Razyskaniya,” 596.

³⁰
Biografiya
, 243–244.

³¹
L. P. Lansky, ed. “N. N. Strakov o Dostoevskom,”
LN
86 (Moscow, 1973), 560.

³²
Ibid.

³³
Ibid., 560–561.

³⁴
Ibid., 562.

On returning to Petersburg in the fall of 1862, both Dostoevsky and Strakhov took up their work on
Time
again with renewed vigor. Grigoryev had also returned from self-imposed exile in Orenburg and was once again a rallying presence. By mid-year,
Time
’s subscription list had gone over the four thousand mark, thus reaching the level of such long-established publications as
Notes of the Fatherland
. Financial security was at last in sight for the hard-pressed Dostoevskys, who had worked like galley slaves to establish their publication on a sound economic footing. Even more encouraging, their editorial portfolio was overflowing with manuscripts that kept pouring in from all corners of Russia and testified to the growing prestige acquired by
Time
in the brief span of two years.

The editors of
Time
, however, found themselves in an increasingly awkward predicament. The government ban of
The Contemporary
in July 1862, along with the simultaneous arrest of Chernyshevsky, had caused a sharp shift in the social-cultural climate. It was no longer possible to criticize radical ideas—no matter how respectfully, or with how many qualifications—without seeming to support the repressive measures of the regime. To cease to argue with the radicals would have meant to abandon
Time
’s very reason for being, but to continue with the same editorial policy was to court disaster and even execration.

Some notion of the tense and suspicious atmosphere then reigning in literary circles may be gathered from Nekrasov’s astonishing frankness in his letter to Dostoevsky explaining why another promised contribution would not be forthcoming. Rumors were circulating, he admitted, “that I betrayed Chernyshevsky [to the authorities] and walk around freely in the open air in Petersburg. . . . In view of all this, I must not, for the time being, give any further cause for ambiguous rumors.”
¹
Dostoevsky was upset by the implications of this letter and had every reason to take umbrage at Nekrasov’s insinuation that
Time
might be considered reactionary. Even though his articles during 1862–1863 reveal his growing disenchantment with the radicals and an increasing tilt toward Slavophilism,
Time
had not become conservative in any sense that would have gained favor
with the authorities. It continued to refer to the
Raskol
, which was officially illegal and rejected the whole apparatus of the Russian state, as proof of the capacity of the Russian people to create their own indigenous forms of culture; and Dostoevsky repeatedly adduces the communal system of landholding as additional evidence of such capacity. Indeed, he could hardly have been clearer in his agreement with the basic tenets of Herzen’s Russian Socialism.

The reappearance of
The Contemporary
at the end of February 1863 brought into the field against
Time
a new and exceedingly formidable foe, the scathing satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, who had now joined the editorial staff of the revived journal; and he was promptly assigned the task, formerly entrusted to the bellicose but inept Antonovich, of carrying on the fight against the
pochvenniki
. Saltykov-Shchedrin, whose
Provincial Sketches
had appeared in Katkov’s
The Russian Messenger
, and some of whose sketches had also graced the pages of
Time
, had not previously been known as a flaming radical. Since Dostoevsky had frequently expressed great admiration for his talents, his sudden intervention as a prominent antagonist was bitterly resented.

Although the argument was carried on anonymously, each recognized the inimitable stamp of the other’s style and tone. Saltykov-Shchedrin labeled
Time
’s contributors as “meek little birds,” constantly living in fear and trembling even though “no one has injured you. No one opposes you, no one even thinks about you.” There was much more in this condescending vein, including the prediction that
Time
would soon “Katkovize,” that is, wholly join the anti-radical camp; but meanwhile, it is trying to maintain an impossible position. “What is the guiding thought of your journal? None. What have you said? Nothing. You have continuously striven to utter some sort of truth on the order of ‘soft-boiled boots’ [a Russian expression for nonsense], you always have sat between two stools, and your naïveté extends so far that you have not wished to notice that you have tumbled to the ground.”
²
This was only the beginning of an increasingly fierce exchange between these two major figures that, a year later, would culminate in a brilliant burst of parodistic dialogue skits on both sides. Nor did Dostoevsky forget to include two satirical barbs against Saltykov-Shchedrin in his very next work,
Notes from Underground
.

Russia, however, was then occupied by events far surpassing in immediate importance the internal squabbles of its native intelligentsia. January 1863 marked the outbreak of still another Polish revolt against Russian hegemony. If Russian opinion had been favorable to the Polish desire for more local independence, feelings quickly shifted after the uprising began with a massacre of sleeping Russian soldiers in their barracks. The Poles also demanded, in addition to independence, a restoration of the Polish borders of 1772, which included Lithuania,
White Russia, and much of the Ukraine. The pressure exerted by France and England on behalf of these claims only succeeded in whipping up Russian nationalism to a fever pitch, and the support of the radicals for the Polish cause (some young Russian officers even deserted and fought with the Poles) ended whatever influence the extreme left still may have had in society at large. Herzen’s support for the Poles, assumed much against his better judgment (he was won over by the volatile Bakunin, always spoiling for a revolution), dealt a deathblow to
The Bell
.

The radicals within the country could hardly express support for the Polish cause in the Russian press. Of course, an event of such gravity did not pass unnoticed; but coverage was limited—as in the case of
Time
—to a neutral summary of official dispatches and an account of the international diplomatic maneuverings. In Moscow, however, Katkov was carrying on a blistering campaign against the Poles and the Russian radicals, whom he threw together into one unsavory heap, and he became the much-applauded man of the hour, the admired voice of Russian patriotic indignation. The failure of the Petersburg press to raise its voice with equal vehemence was bitterly resented in Moscow. The Muscovites were all too ready to take the relative silence as a sign of treason, and they did not hesitate to hurl such an accusation against the first available target offering itself to their fury. Unfortunately for
Time
, this target turned out to be an article by Strakhov that, although intended as a public avowal in favor of the Russian cause, was written in such tortuous and elusive terms that it could be misread as a justification of the desperate Polish revolt.

Time
was suppressed by the government in May 1863; and it is a sad irony that Dostoevsky’s journal should have been shut down at the very moment it was battling most ferociously with
The Contemporary
. Dostoevsky explains what happened in a letter to Turgenev a month after the axe had fallen. “The idea of the article (Strakhov wrote it) was as follows: that the Poles despise us as barbarians to such a degree, are so boastful to us of their ‘European’ civilization, that one can scarcely foresee for a long time any moral peace (the only durable kind) with us. But, as the exposition of the article was not understood, it was interpreted as follows: that we affirmed,
of ourselves
, that the Poles have a civilization so superior to ours, and we are so inferior, that obviously they are right and we are wrong.”
³

Such a charge was indeed instantly made by a writer in the
Moscow Gazette
—a newspaper edited by Katkov—and it was echoed elsewhere. When Dostoevsky wrote a reply, the censorship banned its publication, and, as he indignantly reports to Turgenev, “certain journals (the
Day
, among others) have seriously
undertaken to prove to us that Polish civilization is only a surface civilization, aristocratic and Jesuitical, thus not at all superior to ours,”
⁴
when this was the very point of Strakhov’s article. The tsar, already ill-disposed toward
Time
, decided that the moment had come to put an end to this persistent journalistic nuisance once and for all. The order to ban the publication, handed down on May 24, 1863, was justified not only on the basis of Strakhov’s article but also because of “the harmful tendency of the journal.”
⁵

So ended the life of
Time
, and its demise left Mikhail saddled with a huge load of debt. The event was disastrous from every point of view and produced a further strain in the relations between Strakhov and Dostoevsky. To be sure, Strakhov could not be held entirely to blame because, as editor in charge, Dostoevsky had read and approved his essay. The two remained on ostensibly friendly terms, although the whole disaster left a festering resentment that came out much later in mutually hostile private remarks.