Dostoevsky (87 page)

Chernyshevsky had been arrested on July 7, 1862, and it may cause some confusion to see him mentioned now as the author of a novel published in 1863—a novel, moreover, whose subversive content is plain. But the book did appear with the official imprimatur of the censorship while Chernyshevsky was tightly under lock and key, and its publication is perhaps the most spectacular example of bureaucratic bungling in the cultural realm during the reign of Alexander II. It may also seem surprising that the literary essayist, philosophical commentator, historian, and economist Chernyshevsky should have turned his hand to fiction. But when imprisonment cut him off from his usual literary labors, he decided, with undaunted determination, to take a leaf from two writers he admired, William Godwin and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and carry on his work as ideological mentor of the radicals by means of the novel. The result was
What Is To Be Done?
, which, for all its obvious artistic weaknesses, ranks as one of the most successful works of propaganda ever written in fictional form. Few books have had so effective an impact on the lives of so wide a mass of people, beginning with the efforts of Chernyshevsky’s immediate disciples to form Socialist cooperative communes similar to those he depicted and continuing up to V. I. Lenin, for whom it was a source of personal inspiration.
³

Printed in three issues of
The Contemporary
beginning in March 1863 (and partly overlapping with the publication of
Winter Notes
in
Time
), the work created an indescribable commotion, much of which derived from its polemical relation to
Fathers and Children
. Chernyshevsky staunchly believed that Turgenev’s masterpiece was nothing but a dastardly caricature of Dobrolyubov (who died of tuberculosis in 1861), and his own book undertakes to present a more accurate image of the “new people” (as Dobrolyubov first called the young radicals) whom Turgenev had supposedly defamed. The two chief male characters, Lopukhov and Kirsanov, are both
raznochintsy
and medical students when the book opens—perfect analogues of Bazarov. Both are part of a romantic triangle involving the heroine, Vera Pavlovna, but whereas Bazarov is destroyed when his fatal attraction to Mme Odintsova proves stronger than his will, the opposite occurs to Chernyshevsky’s characters. Since they follow the precepts of “rational
egoism,” they are able to untie the woefully tangled love knot without a quiver of the outdated romantic
Weltschmerz
that undoes Bazarov, or even a trace of such primitive emotions as resentment or jealousy.

This refutation of Turgenev would have been enough to guarantee the book its enormous success, but it gripped the imagination of its young readers even more strongly by offering solutions to the whole range of problems that preoccupied the radical intelligentsia in the 1860s—solutions that, it reassured them, could be put into practice with miraculous ease. Rational egoism was the wonder-working talisman that provided the final key to all human complexities—whether the relations between the sexes, the establishment of new social institutions, the attainment of success in private life, the hoodwinking of the stupid tsarist authorities, or the transformation of mankind both physically and spiritually in the future earthly paradise. All one had to do was accept a rigorous egoism as the norm of one’s behavior, and then believe that a “rational” egoism compels one, by the silent force of logic, always to identify self-interest with that of the greatest good of the greatest number.

It is hardly possible to suppress a smile as Chernyshevsky’s virtuosos of virtue solemnly argue themselves into the conviction that a strict egoism alone determines all their actions. In reality, although ridiculing the ethics of self-sacrifice at every opportunity, they behave in perfect accordance with its precepts. But such behavior is not
felt
by them as self-sacrifice because, according to Chernyshevsky’s image of human nature, once the principles of rational egoism are internalized, obsolescent reactions of “nonrational egoism” simply cease to exist. The passions and the emotions will thus
always
respond in a manner compatible with the injunctions of enlightened reason, which has proven once and for all that to benefit others is in reality the highest degree of self-concern. Nothing more self-renunciatory could be imagined, but this display of the purest virtue is masked as the most arrant and egregious selfishness.

As an example, we may take Lopukhov’s decision to marry Vera Pavlovna immediately, and so rescue her from familial oppression rather than waiting, as had been planned, until he obtained his medical degree; he thus throws up for Vera’s sake the chance of a brilliant academic and medical career. Chernyshevsky is aware that a corrupt and cynical “average” reader may consider this to be strange behavior for an “egoist.” And he hastens to explain that Lopukhov had “made up his mind, conscientiously and resolutely, to renounce all material advantages and honors, so as to work for the benefit of others, finding that the pleasure of such work was the best utility for him.” Armed with this conviction, Lopukhov now finds it easy to give up everything he had striven all his life to attain. What worries him is only whether he is being perfectly consistent. Might he really be giving in to the enemy and making a sacrifice? Instead of interpreting his own actions as a sacrifice, he uses them, on the contrary, to prove the omnipresence of
egoism. “What a hypocrite!” he says of himself. “Why should I take a degree? . . . Perhaps, with lessons and translations, I’ll make even more than a doctor.”
⁴
On the basis of such reasoning, the troubled Lopukhov quiets his fears that he might be infringing on the miraculous tenets of rational egoism.

The most finished illustration of this control of the will by reason is the revolutionary superman Rakhmetov, whose underground activity as an organizer is skillfully conveyed by euphemisms. Rakhmetov is a monster of efficiency and self-mastery. Toughening himself by sleeping on a bed of nails, he subordinates all concern about other people to the attainment of his great unnamed purpose: revolution. Rakhmetov is a Bazarov wholeheartedly absorbed in his cause, unshakable and unconquerable in his strength, and deprived even of the few remaining traits of self-doubt and emotional responsiveness that make his predecessor humanly sympathetic. This ideal of the steel-nerved rationalist-revolutionary who destroys all vestiges of personal sympathies and inclinations so as to comply with the icy logic of social utility forms an intermediate link in the line leading from Bazarov to Raskolnikov.

For the Dostoevsky who had just written
House of the Dead
and
Winter Notes
, Chernyshevsky’s novel, with its touchingly naïve faith in Utilitarian reason, could hardly have been felt except as a direct challenge. And the challenge was all the more provoking because, in the famous fourth dream of Vera Pavlovna, Chernyshevsky brushes in a tableau of the evolution of humanity in the pseudoepical style used by the French Social Romantics like Ballanche and Lamennais at the beginning of the century—an evolution that culminates in the advent of the Socialist Utopia. Not surprisingly, this utopia turns out to resemble the life that Fourier had imagined for his ideal phalanstery, and it would have brought back for Dostoevsky memories of his days in the Petrashevsky Circle, where Fourier’s ideas had been passionately debated in an atmosphere of candid exaltation. Fourteen years later—and what years for Dostoevsky and Russia!—the resurgence of such fantasies could only have appeared to him as the height of absurdity. Once again he was confronted with this dream image of a future in which man had conquered nature and established a way of life allowing all desires to be freely and completely satisfied. All conflict, all unhappiness, all inner striving and spiritual agitation have vanished. This is the literal end of history, whose attainment marks the final stasis of mankind in an unending round of pleasure and gratification. For Dostoevsky, the ideal of such a world called up images of Greco-Roman decadence and the inevitable growth of the most perverse passions in an effort to escape from the sheer boredom of satiation.

To make matters worse, Chernyshevsky had selected as an icon of this glorious world of fulfillment the Crystal Palace of the London World’s Fair—
precisely the same edifice that Dostoevsky had seen as the monstrous incarnation of modern materialism, the contemporary version of the flesh-god Baal. But, to Chernyshevsky’s bedazzled eyes, this structure represented the first hint of what would become the gleaming visual embodiment of the Socialist Utopia of the future, the manifest goal of all human aspirations. In Chernyshevsky’s pages, then, Dostoevsky once again encountered all the old Utopian dreams of the 1840s with which he was so familiar, now allied with the new faith in Utilitarian reason that ran so squarely counter to the sense of human life he had so painfully acquired. One can see why, when it became necessary to supply an artistic text for
Epoch
, his initial intention of writing an article partly devoted to Chernyshevsky’s novel should have blossomed into the idea of providing a more imaginative and artistic response.

Turgenev’s
Phantoms
was secured for
Epoch
, but the journal still needed more prose fiction. Pressed by editorial necessity, Dostoevsky decided to supply a new artistic work for the February deadline, even though the conditions of his life were anything but propitious for artistic creation. “At every instant,” Dostoevsky wrote in January from Moscow, “Marya Dimitrievna sees death before her eyes: she is afflicted and becomes desperate. . . . Her nerves are completely worn out. Her chest is very bad, and she is thin as a nail. It’s terrible! It’s awful to see this!”
⁵

Pasha Isaev had been dispatched to console his mother, but his presence only stirred the agonizing realization that her condition was hopeless, and he was sent home. A rare outside glimpse of the Dostoevskys appears in a letter of Apollon Maikov, who dropped in for a visit in January on a trip to Moscow. “It is terrible,” he tells his wife, “to see how much worse Marya Dimitrievna looks: yellow, nothing but skin and bones, the very image of death. She was very, very happy to see me, asked after you, but her coughing placed a limit on her talkativeness. Feodor Mikhailovich diverts her with various trifles, little handbags, piggybanks, etc., and she seems very pleased with them. They both present a very sad picture: she with tuberculosis, and he with epilepsy.”
⁶

Nevertheless, Dostoevsky tried as best he could to work on a story that, though unnamed, was manifestly the first part of
Notes from Underground
. Yet his own health was also badly deteriorating, and he tells Mikhail at the beginning of February that he has been ill for the past two weeks, not only with epilepsy (“that would not be important,” he remarks) but also with an infection of the bladder that has prevented him from either sitting or lying down comfortably. “I won’t hide from you that my work is going badly. My novella, suddenly, has begun to displease me. However, it’s my own fault. I have messed up
something in it.”
⁷
His failure to meet his deadline, even after pushing it ahead to March, depressed him terribly, and he was also worried that he might have written himself out.

In mid-February, Dostoevsky traveled to Petersburg (Mikhail’s little Varya died during his stay there), and on his return to Moscow on February 29 he wrote both to console his bereaved brother and to outline further plans and projects for
Epoch
. He mentions “the idea for a magnificent article on the theoreticism and the fantastic among the theoreticians (of
The Contemporary
).”
⁸
Although never developed as such, this idea probably became absorbed into
Notes from Underground
, the first part of which was completed sometime around the end of February. Approved by the censorship on March 20, it appeared in the first double number of
Epoch
several weeks later.

It is likely that, in setting out to write his article on
What Is To Be Done?
, Dostoevsky had begun to compose in the familiar first-person style of
Winter Notes
and using the same sort of persona—a Russian accepting Western ideas, but emotionally and subconsciously in revolt against them. In this case, the “Western” ideas would be those of the radicals of the 1860s, as exemplified not only by
What Is To Be Done?
but also, more theoretically, by
The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy
, with its outright denial of free will. When confronted a bit later with the need for a “story,” Dostoevsky retained the original form but gave the “I” of the narrative more social specificity by drawing on his plans for the revision of
The Double
. The conception of Golyadkin, as we know from Dostoevsky’s notebooks, had been evolving steadily in the direction of an inner assimilation of radical ideology; and the narrator of Dostoevsky’s new work thus becomes a development of the Golyadkin type. This supposition—the fusion of the underground man with Golyadkin at a certain stage—is supported by a small detail in the work: both men serve under the same bureau chief, Anton Antonovich Setotchkin.