Dostoevsky (15 page)

Such issues were being posed most luridly in the new French literature that Dostoevsky had been encouraged to read by Cournant’s course. And Shidlovsky’s friendship with Polevoy brought Dostoevsky, even if at one remove, into the orbit of the chief critical advocate of the political liberalism and moral humanitarianism of the French Romantic school. In the same letter in which he speaks of having read Hoffmann and Goethe, Dostoevsky also boasts to Mikhail of having gotten through “almost all of Balzac” and “all of Hugo except
Cromwell
and
Hernani
.”
¹⁹
“Balzac is great,” he writes enthusiastically. “His characters are the creations of universal mind! Not the spirit of a time but the struggle of thousands of years has prepared such a result in the soul of man.”
²⁰
This is Dostoevsky’s first ecstatic response to a writer who, as Leonid Grossman has said, played Virgil to his Dante. No predecessor in the European novel was more important for Dostoevsky than Balzac, and such works as
Eugénie Grandet
and
Le père Goriot
were to serve as trailblazers clearing the path for his own productions.

It was Balzac who took over the historical novel of Scott and used it for the treatment of contemporary social life. It was Balzac who first spoke of Scott as having taught him that the modern novel was “
un drame dialogué
”—and no one would develop the form in this direction more brilliantly than Dostoevsky. Of all of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries, only Balzac can compare with him in uniting a visionary social observation of astonishing exactitude with an inner drama of the soul that spans the entire range of moral experience from the satanic to the divine.

For Balzac, modern French society was nothing but the battleground of a ruthless struggle for power between the old aristocracy of birth and the new freebooters of high finance. In this conflict to the death, all the time-honored moral foundations of the human community were being destroyed. “The Golden Calf,” as Harry Levin writes, “[had] indeed usurped the altar and the throne,”
²¹
and Europe was doomed because it could no longer muster any higher values to oppose the unrestricted reign of material interests. This vision of European society, blocked out in Balzac’s monumental proportions, forms part of the background for Dostoevsky’s later vision of the West. If Karamzin had given him a
sense that Europe was moribund, it was Balzac who probably first persuaded him that Europe was totally in thrall to Baal, the flesh-god of materialism, and that it could not escape the catastrophe of a bloody class struggle—a conviction shared, after all, by his fellow Balzacians Marx and Engels. But Balzac’s work also gave the young Dostoevsky what may have been his first glimpse of the doctrines of the Saint-Simonian school (in
L’Illustre Gaudissart
), which opposed the inhumanity of early capitalism and preached a “new Christianity,” interpreting Jesus as the prophet of a “religion of equality.”

Great as was Dostoevsky’s admiration for Balzac, it was rivaled, if not surpassed, by his worship of Victor Hugo. To judge the significance of this admiration properly, we should remember that, by this time, Hugo and his writings had become a red flag—a symbol for the great wave of social humanitarianism released by the revolution of 1830. “La charité, c’est le socialisme,” wrote Lamartine in 1834,
²²
indicating the Christian sources of the new social movement, and it was as an expression of such Christian sentiments that Hugo spoke of his own work:

J’ai, dans le livre, avec le drame, en prose, en vers,

Plaidé pour les petits et pour les misérables;

Suppliant les heureux et les inexorables;

J’ai réhabilité le bouffon, l’histrion,

Tous les damnés humains, Triboulet, Marion,

Le laquais, le forçat, et la prostituée.
²³

More than thirty years later, Dostoevsky still considered Hugo’s writings to be inspired by “a Christian and highly moral” idea. “It can be formulated as the regeneration of fallen mankind, crushed by the unjust weight of circumstances, the inertia of centuries and by social prejudices . . . [and as] the justification of the humiliated and of all the rejected pariahs of society” (13: 526).

Hugo’s overriding importance for Dostoevsky is exhibited in a passage in a letter to Mikhail early in 1840, in which he compares Homer and Hugo: “Homer (a legendary figure perhaps like Christ, incarnated by God and sent to us) can be paralleled only with Christ. . . . You see, in
The Iliad
Homer gave the entire ancient world the organization of its spiritual and earthly life, exactly in the same sense as Christ to the new. . . . Victor Hugo as a lyric poet, with a pure angelic character, with a childlike Christian tendency in his poetry, and no one can compare with him in this. . . . Only Homer, with the same unshakable
confidence in his mission, with his childlike faith in the god of poetry whom he serves, is similar in the tendency of the source of his poetry to Victor Hugo.”
²⁴

Quite aside from its relation to Hugo, this passage demonstrates Dostoevsky’s early acquaintance with ideas then considered quite “advanced.” If he is willing to entertain the thought that Homer and Christ have both been sent by God, and that their status in relation to mankind is approximately the same, then the youthful Dostoevsky can hardly be accused of any simple-minded acceptance of conventional religious notions; his words smack much more of the Utopian Socialist doctrine of religion as “progressive revelation”
²⁵
than of Christian orthodoxy. Moreover, it is highly significant that Victor Hugo, in the modern world, plays the same role of prophetic mouthpiece of God as is assigned to Homer in the ancient one. Dostoevsky’s thought seems to be that Christ had proclaimed for modernity “the organization of its spiritual and earthly life,” and that Hugo, inspired by this divine source, was expressing in his poetry the true meaning of Christ’s teaching. This would indicate that Dostoevsky’s Christianity had already become strongly social and humanitarian, and was practically identical with what was being called “Socialism” in France. During the summer of 1838, no doubt on Shidlovsky’s recommendation, Dostoevsky plowed through Polevoy’s six-volume
History of the Russian People
. This was the first Russian work utilizing the doctrines of the liberal French Romantic school of historians such as Thierry and Michelet, and it stressed the importance of the spirit of the people, rather than, as did Karamzin, that of the state and of morally enlightened despots.

One of the secrets of Dostoevsky’s genius may well have been his refusal ever to decide emotively between the personal and literary tensions created by his equal devotion to the two Romanticisms. We see his commitment to the supernatural, otherworldly, and more traditionally Christian outlook of metaphysical Romanticism—Christian at least in spirit, and even though the artist is substituted for the priest and the saint. But we also have the strong tug of his feelings toward the practical application of the Christian values of pity and love—toward the “philanthropic” groundswell of the French social Romanticism flooding in ever more irresistibly after 1830. The one keeps its eyes devoutly fixed on the eternal, the other responds to the needs of the moment. The former concentrates on the inner struggle of the soul for purification, the latter combats the degrading influence of a brutalizing environment. The supreme value attributed to suffering comes into conflict with compassion for the weak and the oppressed; the need to justify God’s ways to man clashes with the desire to refashion the world. Dostoevsky felt the competing pull of both these moral and religious imperatives, and the balance of their opposing pressures helps to account for the unremittingly tragic impact of his best work.

¹
Pis’ma
, 4: 242; May 5, 1839.

²
DVS
, 2: 191.

³
Pis’ma
, 1: 56; January 1, 1840.

⁴
Ibid.

⁵
Ibid., 51; October 31, 1838.

⁶
Cited in G. Prochorov, “Die Brüder Dostojewski und Shidlovski,”
Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie
7 (1930), 320.

⁷
Ibid.

⁸
Cited in V. G. Belinsky,
Selected Philosophical Works
(Moscow, 1948), 14.

⁹
Pis’ma
, 1: 56; January 1, 1840.

¹⁰
M. H. Abrams,
Natural Supernaturalism
(New York, 1971), 65.

¹¹
Ibid., 66.

¹²
“From Adam Smith he sought his training / And was no mean economist; / That is, he could present the gist / Of how states prosper and stay healthy / Without the benefit of gold, / The secret being that, all told, the
basic staples
make them wealthy. / His father failed to understand, / And mortgaged the ancestral land” (1.7). Translation by Walter Arndt (New York, 1963).

¹³
Pis’ma
, 1: 47; August 9, 1838.

¹⁴
P. V. Annenkov,
The Extraordinary Decade
, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 13.

¹⁵
Pis’ma
, 1: 46; August 9, 1838.

¹⁶
Ibid., 50; October 31, 1838.

¹⁷
Erich Auerbach,
Mimesis
, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 440.

¹⁸
Cited in Benno von Wiese,
Friedrich Schiller
(Stuttgart, 1959), 448.

¹⁹
Pis’ma
, 1: 47; August 9, 1838.

²⁰
Ibid.

²¹
The Gates of Horn
(New York, 1963), 191.

²²
Cited in David Owen Evans,
Social Romanticism in France, 1830–1848
(Oxford, 1951), 81.

²³
“With book and play, in prose, in verse, I have / Taken up the cause of the weak and those in misery; / Pleading with the happy and the pitiless; / I have raised up the clown, the comedian, / All human beings who are damned, Triboulet, Marion, / The lackey, the convict, and the prostitute.” Victor Hugo,
Oeuvres complètes
(Paris, 1882), 6: 91.

²⁴
Pis’ma
, 1: 58; January 1, 1840.

²⁵
See D. G. Charlton,
Social Religions in France, 1815–1870
(London, 1963), 84.

At the beginning of 1840, Dostoevsky was still an obscure student of military engineering with vague ambitions for a literary career but with nothing to show that such ambitions would ever be realized. By 1845, however, he was being hailed by Belinsky—the most powerful critical force in Russian literature—as the newest revelation on the Russian literary horizon. During these years, he went through a metamorphosis that set him firmly on the road he was to follow the rest of his life. “Brother,” he writes Mikhail in the spring of 1845, “as regards literature
I am not as I was
two years ago. Then it was childishness, nonsense. Two years of study have brought much and taken much away.”
¹
What took place during these two years to bring about such a realization?

If we look for some answer in the events of Dostoevsky’s life, there is little we find there that seems illuminating. His studies at the academy went forward without further incident, and he was promoted to the rank of ensign in August 1841. He continued in the higher classes for officers, but he was now entitled to live outside the school. At first he shared an apartment with a fellow engineer named E. I. Totleben, and this chance acquaintance later played an important role in Dostoevsky’s life after his release from prison camp. Dostoevsky also shared an apartment in 1843 with a young medical student from Revel—a friend of Mikhail’s—named Igor Riesenkampf.

Riesenkampf’s reminiscences of Dostoevsky are the chief source of information about his life at this time, and they give us our first glimpse of the qualities in his character that were always to make relations with him so difficult and so mutable. “Feodor Mikhailovich was no less good-natured and no less courteous than his brother, but when not in a good mood he often looked at everything through dark glasses, became vexed, forgot good manners, and sometimes was carried away to the point of abusiveness and loss of self-awareness.”
²
The inability to bridle his temper—a trait of character that he shared with his father—was to plague Dostoevsky all his life, and to place a heavy burden of tolerance on his friends. Dostoevsky once became exasperated at a social gathering made up
largely of members of the foreign colony in Petersburg and, writes Riesenkampf, he “let fly with such a philippic against foreigners that the startled Swiss took him for some sort of
enragé
and thought it best to beat a retreat.”
³
Dostoevsky’s xenophobia, so disagreeably vehement later, went a long way back and could easily be aroused.

Riesenkampf attributes this extraordinary irascibility to the poor state of his friend’s health. To his medical eye, Dostoevsky’s sallow complexion indicated some blood deficiency, and he noted, too, a tendency to chronic infection of the respiratory organs. And this was not all—for Dostoevsky was continually prey to nervous disorders of various kinds. “He constantly complained to me that, during the night, it seemed that somebody near him was snoring; as a result . . . he was unable to settle down. At such times he got up and spent the rest of the night reading, or most often in working on various stories.”
⁴
Such bouts of insomnia were always followed by periods of extreme irritability, when he would quarrel with everybody for little or no reason. To make matters worse, Dostoevsky was haunted by fears of falling into a lethargic sleep and being buried alive; to forestall such a mishap, he would leave notes asking not to be entombed before the lapse of a certain number of days. Nonetheless, Dostoevsky made great efforts to conceal his various discomfitures and bore them stoically; it was only because they lived together that Riesenkampf became aware of them at all. “In the circle of his friends he always seemed lively, untroubled, self-content.”
⁵