Dostoevsky (144 page)

These intimate conversations with Timofeyeva, combined with public expressions of Populist ideas, influenced Dostoevsky’s opinion of the new radical generation and led to a softening of the harsh judgment expressed in
Demons
. Through her reactions he could see that there was no longer any
irreconcilable
opposition between the Christian moral values he had defended all through the 1860s and those of the Populists. He could still evoke some responsiveness in the new generation, and this ability was also confirmed by a letter from Vsevolod Solovyev (a son of the famous historian S. M. Solovyev), who wrote Dostoevsky the moment he learned that the novelist was again in Petersburg.

Vsevolod Solovyev, later to become a well-known historical novelist, had just embarked on a career as a journalist. He told Dostoevsky how much his novels had helped to shape his own religious convictions, upheld in arguments with school comrades mouthing the more fashionable doctrines of Nihilist atheism.
Moreover, despite such differences of opinion, he assured him that these comrades “regard
Crime and Punishment
as one of the best works—yes, but all the same . . . Russian society still does not understand you as it should . . . and listens to your words . . . with confusion and dismay.”
¹⁶
Dostoevsky was so moved by this tribute that he called on his young admirer a few days later and left his card. Returning the visit, Solovyev soon became Dostoevsky’s friend and literary protégé, and no one in the future would support him more staunchly and more consistently in the Russian press. Like Timofeyeva, he helped to relieve Dostoevsky’s fear that he had become isolated from the younger generation, whom he hoped to dissuade from embarking on the self-destructive path of social revolution.

Dostoevsky also exchanged letters with Vsevolod’s younger brother Vladimir, destined to become the most important Russian philosopher of the turn of the century. A poet as well as a philosopher, Vladimir was a capricious, eccentric, engaging personality with a whimsical sense of humor—a highly intellectualized and spiritualized type of holy fool, which in Russian culture always implies some relation to the religious and sacred. Vladimir had sent an article to
The Citizen
in 1873, with a letter that spoke admiringly of the refusal of the journal to accept “the superstitious reverence” displayed in Russian literature for “the anti-Christian foundations of civilization,” a reverence that made any “free judgment of these foundations” impossible.
¹⁷
Dostoevsky rejected Vladimir’s first article but accepted another a year later after receiving a copy of his master’s thesis,
The Crisis in Western Philosophy
. This talented work had caused a considerable stir for its brilliant style, its deep erudition, and its attack on the reigning acceptance of a semiscientific positivism inconsistently mingled with the profession of secularized Christian moral values. He argued that Western rationalism was now bankrupt, and he claimed that the most recent developments of Western thought—Schopenhauer and the then-fashionable Eduard Hartmann’s
Philosophy of the Unconscious
—were moving in the direction of a fusion with the truths preserved in the religions of the East, specifically in Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Like his older brother Vsevolod, Vladimir had gone through an acute radical period under the influence of reading Pisarev. Dostoevsky’s novels had been one of the most effective remedies that aided both brothers to overcome their adolescent Nihilism. Vladimir once remarked that among the pages he most admired were certain passages in
Demons
, and these would have been presumably those in which Kirillov traverses the deadly dialectic of attempting to replace the God-man with the Man-god. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s unmasking of the mortal dangers of an unrestrained egoism was decisive for Solovyev’s thought, which constantly stresses the importance of attaining a new reconciliation between the atomistic ego, released from the religious bonds of the past, and a revitalized source of absolute moral values.

26. Vladimir Solovyev

Dostoevsky, Anna tells us, was very much taken with his young philosopher-admirer, who became a frequent visitor to their home in 1873. He reminded her husband of a friend of his youth, the innerly tormented and tempestuous poet and God-seeker Ivan Shidlovsky, who had played an important role in his own artistic-spiritual formation. “You resemble him to such a degree in appearance and character,” he once told Vladimir, “that at certain moments I feel his soul to be living in you.”
¹⁸
Solovyev’s pale, gaunt, and angular face, with large black eyes fixed in a distant stare, was framed by locks of hair falling to his stooping shoulders. His image had been compared with the Christ figure appearing in some Russian icons, and occasionally peasants, often taking him for a priest, would kneel down to obtain his blessing. Preferring a comparison with Italian Renaissance art, Dostoevsky was reminded of the Christ image in one of his favorite pictures from the Dresden Gemäldegalerie,
The Head of the Young Christ
by Carracci.

Solovyev left Russia in June 1875 to study abroad, and there he pored over the theosophic and kabbalistic writings in the British Museum. Presumably under their inspiration, he abruptly embarked on a voyage to Egypt. A mysterious
revelation, vouchsafed to him in a vision, had assured him that in this land of ancient mystery he would encounter the Divine Sophia, the feminine incarnation of Eternal Wisdom. Learning one day about a tribe in the desert who supposedly had preserved ancient kabbalistic lore, he decided to walk to their camp wearing his usual black-hued European clothes. The local Bedouins took him for some sort of evil spirit, and the story goes that he barely escaped with his life. Solovyev returned unscathed to Russia in July 1876, and became particularly close to Dostoevsky during the very last years of the novelist’s life.

Dostoevsky’s duties as editor of
The Citizen
turned out to be far more demanding than he had anticipated, partly because of his own exigent literary standards and partly because the editorial interferences of Meshchersky plagued him as much as they had Gradovsky. Meshchersky was sarcastically known in radical circles as “Prince Full Stop” after having flatly declared in one of his articles that “it is necessary to bring the fundamental reforms [initiated by Alexander II with the liberation of the serfs in 1861] to a full stop.”
¹⁹

Dostoevsky’s problems as editor were also compounded by the debonair carelessness of Meshchersky about the regulations governing the Russian press. At the end of January 1873,
The Citizen
published an article by the prince in which he directly quoted Alexander II asking the head of a Kirghiz delegation whether he spoke Russian. It was forbidden to cite such august utterances without special permission, and the nonchalant prince, accustomed to chatting with royalty, had neglected to abide by this formality. Legal responsibility fell not on the author but on the editor of the publication, Dostoevsky, who was condemned to pay a fine of twenty-five rubles and spend two days in the guardhouse. His lawyer told him to plead not guilty, and he later commented ironically on the legal advice he was given (and followed) when the violation of the law was perfectly obvious.

No later than the end of his first month as editor, Dostoevsky confesses to his niece Sofya Ivanova that “My time has now shaped up so awfully that I can only curse myself for the resolve with which I suddenly took upon myself the editorship of the journal.”
²⁰
He had promised Meshchersky that he would supply the weekly with a column of political commentary, and he wrote to Anna (who had taken the children to Staraya Russa for the summer) that “I have to read through newspapers by the dozens” in order to write such political articles. No wonder he says that “horribly depressing thoughts and . . . dejection . . . [have] overcome me almost to the point of illness at the thought that I have tied myself down to all this hard labor at
The Citizen
for at least another year.”
²¹

Soliciting a contribution from the nationalist historian Mikhail Pogodin, whose staunchly patriotic writings Dostoevsky admired, he complains that the weekly had no secretary to take care of routine business matters, and even more, “my main source of distress is the mountain of topics on which I would like to write myself.” “Much needs to be said,” he continues, “for which reason I first joined the journal . . . here is my goal and thought: Socialism . . . has corroded an entire generation. . . . We need to fight, because everything has been infected. My idea is that Socialism and Christianity are antitheses. That is what I would like to show in a whole series of pieces, but meanwhile I haven’t even started.”
²²

The summer of 1873 was a particularly difficult time for Dostoevsky. His editorial duties required him to remain in Petersburg separated from his family in Staraya Russa. His letters are filled with laments about his sadness and loneliness, his (sometimes frightening) dreams about his children, his concern over Anna’s health, and the difficulties of making arrangements so he could spend a few days in the country. Recounting a nightmare in which his son Fedya falls from a fourth-floor windowsill, he instructs Anna: “Write me as soon as possible about whether anything happened to Fedya. . . . I believe in second sight, the more so as it is factual, and I won’t calm down until I get your letter.”
²³

Provided now with an income for his own expenses, Dostoevsky was still constantly in economic straits when the time came to meet the installments for the debts of his deceased brother Mikhail. A due date fell in late July, and he was forced to pawn his watch to pay off this obligation. Some consolation, however, was provided by an evening spent with Pobedonostsev, whose invitation he accepted even though he had felt feverish for a week. He tells Anna gratefully that his host had been very solicitous: “He wrapped me in a blanket; . . . he himself saw me down three flights of stairs, with a candle in his hand, right out to the street entrance.” What gratified him even more was the news that the latter had read
Crime and Punishment
with great appreciation “upon the recommendation of a certain person, an admirer of mine very well known to you, whom he accompanied to England.” Pobedonostsev had just returned from vacationing on the Isle of Wight with Tsarevich Alexander, who had been the guest of the British royal family. “Consequently,” Dostoevsky writes, “things are not as bad as all that. (Please don’t chatter about this, darling Anechka).”
²⁴

Anna returned to Petersburg with the children at the end of August 1873, and Dostoevsky could once again resume the tranquil routine of family life he had so much longed for in their absence. But the anxieties and grueling routine of meeting weekly deadlines never ceased for a moment. If Meshchersky’s editorial high-handedness
provided a constant source of friction, much more serious conflicts arose when they clashed on social-cultural issues. In one instance
The Citizen
became involved in a controversy with the
St. Petersburg News
, and both Dostoevsky and the prince worked on a reply. Meshchersky brought up the question of revolutionary proclamations from abroad circulating in the student milieu; and he suggested that such “distractions” might be circumvented if students lived in dormitories under the surveillance of the authorities. Dostoevsky had no objections to improving student living conditions, but explains in a note to the prince why he unceremoniously struck out seven lines “about the
task
of government surveillance.” “I have my reputation as a writer,” Dostoevsky states, “and in addition I have children. I do not intend to
destroy
myself.” The next sentence, inked out in the original text, has been deciphered: “Besides, your idea is deeply opposed to my convictions and fills my heart with indignation.”
²⁵
This last sentence was obviously too impolitic for the rabidly reactionary Prince Full Stop, who, true to form, countered that “I presume you are not of the opinion that the students should be
without
surveillance.”
²⁶
Although no answer was given to this challenge, the odious seven lines, which would have ruined Dostoevsky’s reputation forever as the partisan of a police state, remained unprinted.