Dostoevsky (196 page)

He had become a revered, symbolic figure who stood above the merciless battle of ideologies. His works had raised all the burning issues of the day far beyond the limits of a narrow partisanship. While Dostoevsky was being pilloried by the liberal and radical press, the presumably left-wing students were receiving him with open arms; and the reason, as his friend Orest Miller wrote in the January issue of the Populist Slavophil journal
The Week
, was that he always spoke “openly and boldly in all directions, not worrying what would be said about him. The youth welcome, with the discernment of the heart, everything straightforward and unservile.”
¹⁴

While he was organizing the notes for the January issue of his
Diary
, others for February and March piled up. Several articles written by Suvorin shortly after Dostoevsky’s decease provide information about what the future
Diary
might have contained. One comment reveals the astonishing paradox of Dostoevsky’s social-political position—the dream of an ideal Russia coming to birth in a state embodying the very opposite of what such a dream was striving to attain. “In his opinion,” Suvorin writes, “it is possible for us to attain complete freedom, a freedom existing nowhere else, and all this without any revolution, any restrictions, any controls.”
¹⁵
In a conversation about the continuation of
The Brothers Karamazov
, Suvorin heard from the author that “Alyosha Karamazov would emerge as the hero of the novel’s continuation, a hero from whom [Dostoevsky] wished to create a type of Russian Socialist, not the usual type that we know and which sprouted entirely out of European soil.”
¹⁶
Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich recalls Suvorin as having also quoted these words: “It seems to you [Suvorin—J. F.] that in my last novel,
The Brothers Karamazov
, there was much that was prophetic. But wait for the continuation. In it Alyosha will leave the monastery and become an anarchist. And my pure Alyosha will
kill the Tsar.”
¹⁷
If there is any mistake in the testimony of the grand duke, it would be in characterizing Alyosha as an “anarchist” rather than as the much more plausible “Russian Socialist,” a term that receives some support from the
Diary
.

On January 22, Anna records in her notebook that, in speaking of their plans for the summer, they had discussed a long-cherished ambition to purchase a country estate. “In the evening,” she writes, “we talked about where to go, and he spoke of his dreams.”
¹⁸
With the money still owed him by
The Russian Messenger
and the subscriptions pouring in for the new
Diary
, he thought it possible. On the twenty-fourth, he was a dinner guest of Countess Tolstaya and borrowed a copy of her late husband’s play about Ivan the Terrible to prepare for the theatrics, and he also made the final corrections to the
Diary
. The next day, January 25, he went to the printing plant with these pages and asked that galleys be sent the day following. He also wrote to Countess Komarovskaya, accepting her invitation to the Winter Palace on the first day he thought he would be free, January 29.

At times, in these pages for the
Diary
, he comes dangerously close not only to criticizing government policy but also to impugning its very basis. “I believe as a matter of economics,” he writes in a passage that could well be considered subversive, “that the land is
possessed
, not by railway magnates, not by the industrialists, not by the millionaires, not by the banks, and not by the Yids, but only by those who cultivate it . . . the tillers of the soil are themselves the state, its nucleus, its vital core.” But the financing of railways, which were built at a speed much greater than in Europe, was done “when the land was most in need of [capital]” (27: 10). No wonder he was so concerned about getting this issue of the
Diary
through the censorship! It was impossible for him to expatiate any further on the question of “possession” without implying that the peasants should not be required to buy back their own land from those who had no right to its ownership.

Naturally, the government had always been concerned with the peasants; numerous commissions had been appointed over the years to study their “economic health” and every aspect of their way of life (27: 13). Dostoevsky insists, however, that the people have become totally alienated from all the social institutions of Russia because the
zemstvos
and the courts are all under the control of the bureaucracy. Even the
obshchina
, that bastion of Russian peasant democracy, “seems to be moving toward becoming a kind of authority” because its elections are now overseen by “some government official or other” (27: 17).

Indeed, the more the authorities try to aid the people, the worse the situation becomes. Their total misunderstanding of the people derives from a failure to grasp the importance of Orthodoxy, which constitutes the very essence of the people’s being. Dostoevsky writes: “I am speaking now not about church buildings and not about sermons; I am speaking about our Russian Socialism (and . . . I am taking this word, which is quite the opposite of all that the church represents, to explain my idea)” (27: 18). In daring to apply the phrase “Russian Socialism” to his own messianic hope, he employs a term first coined by Herzen to predict that the peasant-based cooperative social institutions of Russia, such as the
obshchina
and the
artel
, would take the lead over Europe in creating the Socialist world of the future. Dostoevsky thus stresses, as he had already done with Alyosha Karamazov, the similarity between his own ultimate aims and those of the Russian radicals. But for him, this aim had now become identified with “the establishment of the universal church on earth, insofar as the earth is capable of containing it”; and he believed that such an aim was shared, even if only inchoately and unconsciously, by the vast multitude of the Russian peasantry (27: 18–19).

The people trust only in God and the tsar, and for Dostoevsky the first step toward relieving their malaise is to sweep away everything that stands between them and their revered ruler. “Summon the gray peasant coats,” he admonishes, “and ask them what they lack and what they need and they will tell the truth, and all of us, for the first time perhaps, will hear the real truth!” (27: 21). Today we can hardly imagine just how daring such a Populist suggestion was in a totally despotic state, all of whose policy and decisions were determined in secret by the tsar and his advisers, and in which the democratic notion of consulting the people was considered nothing less than lèse-majesté. Nor was Dostoevsky suggesting what the Russians call a
zemsky sobor
, an assembly of all classes in the land, which had been convoked during the Time of Troubles and established the Romanov family as the ruling house. No, only the peasantry should be consulted. “[A]nd we, ‘the people’s intelligentsia,’ shall stand meekly aside for the moment and at first merely look on while they speak and we listen” (27: 24). Dostoevsky explains that he is asking the intelligentsia to step aside not for “political” but for pedagogical reasons. This image of the people was either scornfully dismissed, or more charitably regarded as just another flight of Dostoevsky’s artistic-poetic imagination.

Dostoevsky concludes this issue of the
Diary
with reflections on Russian foreign policy, prompted by the advance of a Russian expeditionary force into Central Asia. The liberal St. Petersburg journals were highly critical of this imperialist adventure, particularly in view of the financial difficulties with which the country was struggling. Dostoevsky took up the cudgels not only to praise the victorious General Skobelev and his troops, but also to expound again the
thematic leitmotif of this first issue—Russia was not Europe, and hence should not determine its foreign policy with European interests and concerns in mind.

For Dostoevsky, the spread of Russian power in Central Asia will shake the prestige of England and convince all the peoples “up to the very borders of India . . . of the invincibility of the white Tsar and the omnipotence of his sword” (27: 32). The time is now ripe for Russia to think of Asia, which could play the same role for it as the discovery of America had done for Europe. All of Russia would be rejuvenated by this acquisition, the country would free itself from its inertia and sense of dependence on Europe, and a brave new world would come to birth. “In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, while in Asia we shall be the masters.” Like other advocates of imperialism, Dostoevsky argues that Russia will perform “a civilizing mission” in Asia, but he is perhaps more straightforward in pointing to all the riches that could be exploited—“the metals, the minerals, the countless coal fields.” And Asiatic expansion would also revitalize the Russians themselves. “Our mission will elevate our spirits, it will help give us dignity and self-awareness” (27: 36–37).

Dostoevsky had always relished predicting the downfall of European civilization, and he now adds some new touches to the usual evocation of merciless class warfare. “Let people understand that when Europe, because of overcrowding alone, establishes the inevitable and humiliating communism, which she herself will loathe, when whole crowds of people will have to press around a single hearth and, little by little, individual households will be destroyed and families will abandon their own homes and start living collectively in communes, when children (three-quarters of them foundlings) are raised in institutions, then—then we shall still have broad expanses, fields, and forests, and our children will grow up with their own fathers, not in cramped stone prisons, but amid orchards and cultivated fields, seeing the pure, blue sky above them” (27: 38). Presumably, Asiatic expansion will drain off enough of the Russian population to avoid the “overcrowding” that will stifle Europe. And so he concludes: “Long live Skobelev and his good lads, and eternal memory to the heroes who were ‘struck off the rolls’ ” (27: 40). Three days after editing this celebratory elegy, Dostoevsky’s name itself vanished from the rolls of the living.

It is regrettable that the last words from his pen should glorify imperial conquest, and perhaps we can alleviate their dispiriting effect by citing some others, written at approximately the same time, that provide a more adequate picture of the full scope of his complex and self-conflicted personality. In his last notebooks, he wrote: “With total realism, to find the man in mankind. This is primarily a Russian trait, and in this sense I am really in the last analysis of the people [
naroden
] (for my tendency flows from the depths of the Christian soul of the people)—although I am unknown to the Russian people at present, I will be known in the future” (27: 65). This is the Dostoevsky who has become an important
part of the patrimony of world culture, not the misguided patriot waving the banner of imperial domination, though it is part of the mystery of the human personality with which he struggled that both could coexist in his breast.

On the twenty-fifth of January, Dostoevsky was visited by two of his oldest friends, Apollon Maikov and Nikolay Strakhov. Conversation turned on the January issue of the
Diary
, as well as his plans for the February number, and then Orest Miller arrived. Miller had his own business to transact about the Pushkin evening. Posters for the event listing Dostoevsky were already on display, but Dostoevsky decided against his first choice and wished to read some of Pushkin’s shorter poems. Miller, understandably, became quite exasperated. Aside from the problem of the posters, it could lead to endless bother with the censorship and the other authorities whose consent would be required for any alteration. Dostoevsky’s annoyance in turn changed to genuine anger. Matters were settled when Miller agreed to the change, but there is no doubt that, on the afternoon of January 25, Dostoevsky had been subjected to severe nervous strain.

After the unfortunate disaccord, Dostoevsky departed for the printing plant to hand in the final corrections for the last pages of the
Diary
. Returning home at 7:30, the usual time for the family dinner, he joined Anna and the children, who had been to the theater and seen a play taken from
The Pickwick Papers
. “And all through the dinner,” Anna writes, “we spoke of the Pickwick club, recalling every particularity, telling him about them, and then I asked who that actor was. ‘Mr. Jingle,’ answered Feodor Mikhailovich.”
¹⁹
There is something extremely touching about this image of Dostoevsky, on one of the last days of his life, talking lightheartedly with his wife and children about Dickens, an author whom he loved both for his gaiety and for his Christian compassion—a compassion so much less tortured and tormented than his own. Extremely touching, but, as it turns out, entirely fictional.