Dostoevsky (163 page)

Kept imprisoned for two years, even though no charges were filed against her, she was declared innocent and emerged as a hardened revolutionary. On learning
that General Trepov, the governor of St. Petersburg, had illegally ordered the flogging of a Populist political prisoner for refusing to remove his cap in the general’s presence, she calmly walked into his office on a false pretext and shot him, though wounding him only slightly. Her open trial, presided over by Dostoevsky’s friend, A. F. Koni, was conducted with scrupulous impartiality, despite pressure from official circles. Koni, whose later career suffered as a result, allowed the defense to introduce detailed testimony about the relentless flogging. The result was a triumphant acquittal of the defendant, to the wild applause of a courtroom packed with high government functionaries and notables from the most select Petersburg society. Admission to the courtroom was limited, but Dostoevsky was present with a card falsely declaring him to be a member of the legal profession.

During the course of the trial, other Populist prisoners, called as witnesses by the defense, unanimously testified to the constant brutalities they had been forced to endure, and those frightening glimpses into the reality of the prison world produced a shattering effect. Elizaveta Naryshkin-Kurakina, a lady-in-waiting to one of the grand duchesses (and an acquaintance of Dostoevsky’s), was scarcely to be suspected of revolutionary sympathies. But she wrote in her
Memoirs
, “The appearance of a number of young political prisoners created quite a stir. They had been brought into the courtroom from the Peter-and-Paul Fortress merely as witnesses to the incident in the prison. Their pale faces, their voices trembling with tears and indignation, the details of their depositions—all these statements made me lower my eyes with shame.”
⁶
Gradovsky, whom Dostoevsky had replaced as editor of
The Citizen
, remembered feeling that, as the testimony of these youthful defense witnesses unrolled, not Zasulich but he himself and all of Russian society stood accused and were standing trial.
⁷

Dostoevsky had raged against flogging in
House of the Dead
, and perhaps General Trepov’s order reminded him of the savage brutalities of the sadistic Major Krivtsov of his prison camp years. Like so many others at the tribunal, he could not suppress sympathy for the vengeful Zasulich, who during her testimony had said: “It is terrible to raise one’s hand against a fellow man . . . but I decided that this is what I had to do.” The clash between her moral conscience and her social-political convictions made a deep impression on Dostoevsky, who felt that no formal legal judgment would be the best solution. If found guilty, she would become a martyr; if acquitted, her act would be given a legal sanction, and the authority of the Russian state would be undermined.

His prediction that Zasulich would become a heroine was soon all too dramatically borne out. On emerging from the courthouse, she was carried on the shoulders of a celebrating crowd, and this militant rejoicing led to a demonstration
that ended with a splattering of gunfire and one death. When the police arrived to arrest Zasulich again, she had vanished into the throng and was later smuggled out of the country. Once abroad, she continued a notable revolutionary career in Switzerland, eventually aligning herself with Plekhanov and the Mensheviks against Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution.

The shot fired by Zasulich echoed throughout Russia, and her example spurred on others to take up arms against tsarist officials. Indeed, in the months following her trial a wave of terrorist attacks was carried out by her hitherto peaceful comrades, formerly devoted only to propaganda among the people. High officials of the regime were killed in Kiev and Odessa, and General Mezentsev, the head of the dreaded secret police, was struck down by a dagger in broad daylight in the very heart of St. Petersburg as revenge for the death of a Populist prisoner. His assassin was Stepniak-Kravchinsky, a young Populist who had fought with the Serbs in their battle against the Turks and who, after the murder, escaped abroad. He became a noted writer whose
Underground Russia
is still an indispensable source for the Populist movement, and, while in exile in London, helped Constance Garnett improve her Russian. He is often considered one of the prototypes of Razumov in Conrad’s
Under Western Eyes
.

Dostoevsky comments on the Mezentsev murder to Victor Putsykovich, an old journalist friend who was now receiving warning letters from “Odessa Socialists” threatening him with death if he did not stop printing articles against the Nihilists (he had forwarded these to Mezentsev without receiving a reply). Besides revealing the incompetence of the secret police, the reference to Odessa also occasions another display of Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitic obsession. “Odessa, a city of Yids, turns out to be the center of our militant Socialism. There’s the same phenomenon in Europe: the Yids are terribly active in Socialism, and I won’t even mention the Lassalles and Karl Marxes. And it’s understandable: for Yids the whole benefit is from any kind of radical shock or upheaval in the state, because they themselves are a
status in statu
, making up their own community that will never be shaken but will only gain from any kind of weakening of anything that is not the Yids.”
⁸
In fact, very few of the Populists were of Jewish origin (Jewish youth would flock to the radical banner only later in the century), but Dostoevsky preferred not to accuse those purebred Russian lads whose desire for self-sacrifice he hoped to guide into other channels.

Considering the enormous prestige he enjoyed at this time, such hopes were hardly groundless. A commentator in
Voice
, referring to the termination of the
Diary
, regretted its disappearance “particularly in relation to the younger generation” and remarked that “the majority of the young, with their unspoiled intuition, were able to decipher his deep genuineness and sincerity and valued
these very highly.”
⁹
The oracular status he had now assumed is manifest in a letter sent to him on April 8, 1878, by a group of students at the University of Moscow.

“Dear Feodor Mikhailovich,” the students wrote, “for two years now we have been accustomed to turn to your
Diary
for the solution, or for the proper posing, of the questions that loomed before us; we have been accustomed to use your decisions for the establishment of our own views, and to honor them even when we did not agree.”
¹⁰
One of the six signatories was Pavel Milyukov, later a famous historian of Russian culture, leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party in the Russian Duma after 1905, and then foreign minister in an interim government before the Bolshevik takeover. The immediate occasion for this joint missive was a manifestation of popular anger directed at the activities of the young dissidents.

A number of Moscow students had gone to greet a convoy of students from the University of Kiev, who had been arrested on minor charges and were being sent to the provinces in police custody. As they proceeded together peacefully through the streets, some butchers and shopkeepers from a local food market swarmed out and, to shouts of “Beat them!” severely manhandled some of the young men. This physical attack was one of the first of its kind on such a scale, an eye-opening indication of the lack of solidarity of the urban lower-class population with student unrest. This realization caused a crisis of self-questioning in the student ranks. “What is most important for us,” they told Dostoevsky, “is to resolve the question: To what extent are we, the students, guilty, and what conclusions about us should be drawn by society, and by ourselves, from this occurrence?”

To the first part of this question Dostoevsky gave an unequivocal reply: “In my view you are not guilty at all. You are only children of that very same ‘society’ which you are now deserting, and which is ‘a lie in every sense.’ ” Students, he continues, “are in rightful revolt—though unfortunately still only in a European (that is, Socialist) manner. . . . Instead of going to the people so as to live their life, the young people, knowing nothing about it . . . simply despising its foundations, for example, religious faith, went not to learn from the people but . . . to instruct it arrogantly, with contempt—a purely aristocratic, leisure-class pastime!” Although he deplores the beatings, such violence was only to be expected; the people “are uncouth, they are
muzhiks
.”
¹¹

Dostoevsky, however, refused to lose heart, despite the assassinations during the spring and summer of 1878 causing panic in the country. What he saw, or
wished to see, to counterbalance a menacing reality—he writes to Leonid Grigoryev of “the hideousness of rural district administrations and morals, vast quantities of vodka, incipient pauperism and a kulak class, that is, European proletariat and bourgeoisie”—was a new consciousness that had burgeoned among the people with the Russo-Turkish War: “There has been established in them . . . a political consciousness, a precise understanding of Russia’s meaning and mission.” But to impute such a “precise” understanding to the people was too much even for him, and he adds that this understanding was at least “
constantly becoming precise
. . . . In short, . . . the beginnings of higher ideas, . . . the rest will come. One must penetrate beneath the surface of the people to uncover the hidden reality.” One should not believe that “the hideous facts” reveal the essence of their ideals.
¹²
He was unshakably convinced that the Populists’ return to the moral ideals of a secular Christianity was only the first step in their eventual acceptance of the truth of a supernatural Christ, and that his mission was to supply the leadership in this direction that was so woefully lacking.

During these very months, when Dostoevsky was consulted by students who, if they were not prowling the streets with revolvers themselves, sympathized with those who were, he was also asked to meet with some young men who might easily become their targets. Sometime in the first week of February 1878 he received a visit from D. S. Arsenyev, the tutor of the Grand Dukes Sergey and Paul, the younger sons of Alexander II. The purpose of the call, made in the name of the tsar himself, was to invite him to become acquainted with Arsenyev’s pupils, so that, to quote Anna, “by his conversations Feodor Mikhailovich might have a beneficial influence on the youthful grand dukes.”
¹³

What Dostoevsky must have felt at such a moment can well be imagined. He—who had been convicted of a crime against the state! He—who had served a prison term at hard labor in Siberia and worn the shackles and striped garment of a convict for four painful years! He—who had sunk to the lowest depths of Russian society and shared the fate of the most hardened criminals! He—now invited to enter as an honored guest into the most exalted and exclusive court circles, and to serve as guide and counselor to those in whose hands the future of Russia would eventually be entrusted!

His first appearance at court was recorded in the diary of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, a cousin of Sergey and Paul and the son of the commander of the Russian Navy.
¹⁴
“I dined at Sergey’s.” he wrote. “His guests were K. N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin and Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. I was very much interested in the latter, and had read his works. . . . He speaks extremely
well, as well as he writes.”
¹⁵
This visit to his royal interlocutors was a success, and invitations to dine with them came regularly thereafter. He now found himself in the extraordinary position of being a cherished adviser not only of the young radical generation but also of the younger members of the reigning family. And if he felt that fate (or God) had entrusted him with a mission at this crucial moment of Russian history, he certainly had objective reasons for believing that such a momentous task should have fallen to his lot. Indeed, ever since returning from Siberia in 1860, he had endeavored to play precisely the role into which he had now been cast—that of arbitrator and conciliator between the dissident intelligentsia and Russian society as a whole.

Never, indeed, could Dostoevsky have felt himself in a better position to influence public opinion. Had the
Diary
not furnished ample proof of the power of his words to grip the minds and hearts of his readers? And never could he have felt it more essential to do so than in the late 1870s, when the earlier crises of Russian nineteenth-century society shrank into insignificance before the menace of the present. A fraction of the Populists, driven to despair by the relentless persecutions of the government and the lack of any response to their peaceful propaganda among the peasantry, had launched a systematic campaign of terror against tsarist officialdom and finally against the tsar himself. Both the novel Dostoevsky was now beginning and his sensational speech at the ceremonies inaugurating a monument to Pushkin two years later would mark his attempts to mediate the lethal conflict that was tearing Russian society apart.