Dostoevsky (30 page)

The long-range effect of this crisis was probably to sharpen Dostoevsky’s sense of the absolute incompatibility between reason and faith. This paved the way for his later commitment to an irrationalism for which he had been prepared both by his religious and philosophical education and by the psychic experience he called “mystic terror.” Like Kierkegaard, with whom he has so often been compared in the last half-century, Dostoevsky also later indicated that a paradoxical “leap of faith” was the only source of religious certainty. And the similarity of solution derives from the identity of the point of departure: Kierkegaard greatly admired Feuerbach for stressing how impossible it was to combine religion with the scientific and rational character of modern life. “Feuerbach,” writes Karl Löwith, “perceived this contrast in exactly the same way that Kierkegaard did; but the latter drew the equally logical, but exactly opposite, conclusion: that science, and natural science in particular, is simply irrelevant to the religious situation.”
²⁶
Dostoevsky too finally chose to take his stand with the existential irrational of the “leap of faith” against Feuerbach’s demand that religion be brought down to earth and submit to the criterion of human reason.

It would require many years, however, before Dostoevsky would begin to draw such conclusions. For the moment, he sought a more congenial atmosphere than he had found in the Pléiade or with Belinsky personally. A new group of friends, the little-known Beketov Circle, provided the emotional support he was looking for as his literary reputation declined and relations with Belinsky became tense.

¹
Pis’ma
, 2: 364; May 18/30, 1871.

²
Victor Considérant,
La destinée sociale
, 3 vols. (Paris, 1851), 2: 38.

³
V. G. Belinsky,
Selected Philosophical Works
(Moscow, 1948), 165–166.

⁴
P. V. Annenkov,
The Extraordinary Decade
, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 35.

⁵
Ivan Turgenev,
Literary Reminiscences
, trans. David Magarshack (New York, 1958), 123.

⁶
V. G. Belinsky,
Izbrannye pis’ma
, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1955), 2: 259.

⁷
Annenkov,
Decade
, 211–213.

⁸
Belinsky,
IP
, 2: 286.

⁹
Belinsky,
Works
, 369.

¹⁰
V. Evgenyev-Maksimov,
Sovremennik v 40–50 godakh
(Leningrad, 1934), 143–144.

¹¹
Annenkov,
Decade
, 208.

¹²
Maxime Leroy,
Histoire des idées sociales en France
, 3 vols. (Paris, 1946–1954), 2: 442.

¹³
Belinsky,
IP
, 2: 389.

¹⁴
DW
(no. 1, 1873), 6–7.

¹⁵
Ibid., 148.

¹⁶
Ibid., 7.

¹⁷
Ibid.

¹⁸
Ibid.

¹⁹
Pis’ma
, 2: 364; May 18/30, 1871.

²⁰
DW
(no. 1, 1873), 8.

²¹
Evgenyev-Maksimov,
Sovremennik
, 117.

²²
DW
(no. 1, 1873), 8.

²³
When Arnold Ruge, the editorial impresario of the Left Hegelians, arrived in Paris in August 1843 to recruit contributors for the
Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher
, the atheism of the Left Hegelians proved a major obstacle. “Almost without exception they [the French] were believers and held to Robespierre’s anathema of godless philosophy.” David McLellan,
The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx
(London, 1969), 37–38. Writing to Feuerbach from Paris in May 1844, Ruge says disgustedly, “All parties base themselves directly on Christianity.” Cited in Werner Sombart,
Der proletarische Sozialismus
, 2 vols. (Jena, 1924), 1: 119.

²⁴
DW
(no. 1, 1873), 9.

²⁵
See Henri de Lubac,
Le drame de l’humanisme Athée
(Paris, 1950), esp. part 3, and also the penetrating remarks, based on a wide knowledge of the sources, in Andrzej Walicki,
W kregu konserwatywnej utopi
(Warsaw, 1964), chap. 14.

²⁶
Karl Löwith,
From Hegel to Nietzsche
(New York, 1967), 334–335.

The first mention of Dostoevsky’s new acquaintances occurs in mid-September 1846—after the crisis induced by the failure of
The Double
. “I take my dinner with a group,” he writes Mikhail. “Six people . . . including Grigorovich and myself, have gotten together at Beketovs.”
¹
These were months when Dostoevsky was “almost in a panic of fear about my health,”
²
but the psychological aid provided by his friends seems to have restored him completely. “Brother,” he writes two months later, “I am reborn, not only morally but also physically. Never have I felt in myself so much abundance and clarity, so much equanimity of character, so much physical health. I am indebted for much of this to my good friends . . . with whom I live; they are sensible and intelligent people, with hearts of gold, of nobility and character. They cured me by their company.”
³
The security supplied by his new milieu was of great importance in helping him to weather the perturbations brought on by Belinsky’s rejection.

The center of the group was Aleksey N. Beketov, who had been one of Dostoevsky’s intimates at the Academy of Military Engineers, and the group included his two brothers, then still students, Nikolay and Andrey. Grigorovich spoke of Beketov as “the embodiment of goodness and straightforwardness,” around whom people unfailingly clustered because of his outstanding moral qualities. He was the sort of person who “became indignant at every sort of injustice and was responsive to every noble and honorable endeavor,” and it was he who set the dominating tone, which was strongly social-political. “But whoever spoke, and whatever was spoken about . . . everywhere one could hear indignant, noble outbursts against oppression and injustice.”
⁴

Nothing more is known about the Beketov Circle, which came to an end when the two younger brothers left for the University of Kazan early in 1847. N. Flerovsky, a student at Kazan in 1847, remembered that “They propagated the teaching of Fourier, and here the results were the same as in Petersburg”; presumably he
meant that they attracted others and formed a circle.
⁵
The Beketovs were evidently Fourierists; and Dostoevsky’s reference to “the benefits of association” points to the Utopian Socialist orientation of the group. Dostoevsky preferred not to call attention to this new affiliation in his later writing, for his connection with them calls into question the portrait he painted of himself as he was supposed to have been in the 1840s. Far from being a political innocent, abruptly baptized into Socialism, atheism, and materialism all at once by the great intellectual agitator Belinsky, Dostoevsky was a committed moral-religious progressive who stoutly maintained his convictions in the face of Belinsky’s attacks and then allied himself with others of the same persuasion.

It was at the Beketovs that he became acquainted with the well-known poet, then still a student, Aleksey Pleshcheev, who has already been mentioned and whose name turns up everywhere in the annals of the progressive intelligentsia during the 1840s. The attractive and well-bred scion of an aristocratic family—gentle, tenderhearted, cloudily rhapsodic—Pleshcheev became a close friend of Dostoevsky. During the 1840s, the two young men were inseparable, and, as public evidence of this amity, they dedicated stories to each other. The ethos of Pleshcheev’s work, which constantly evokes the image of the Utopian Socialist Christ, was close to Dostoevsky’s heart. Even in a poem that became “the hymn of several generations of revolutionaries,”
⁶
the poet enjoins his comrades, condemned like himself to torture and execution, to pardon “our senseless executioners”
⁷
with Christian forgiveness.

It was also through the Beketovs that Dostoevsky struck up an equally close friendship with Valerian Maikov. Two years younger than Dostoevsky, Maikov had a brief but meteoric career in Russian letters beginning in 1845 and ending with his untimely death by a stroke in the summer of 1847. During this short span, however, he made a considerable splash by taking over the post of chief critic on
Notes of the Fatherland
from Belinsky, turning the journal into an organ of the Utopian Socialist Beketov tendency and setting himself up as rival of the powerful reigning arbiter of taste and ideas. Not only did Maikov visit the Beketovs’, he was also among the early members of the circle gathered around Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevsky, whose Friday evenings also attracted Pleshcheev and were soon to become the rallying place for the progressive intelligentsia in Petersburg.

Maikov praised Dostoevsky fervently and was the only voice raised to defend him against Belinsky’s criticisms. The death of his friend a few months later was a terrible blow to Dostoevsky, depriving him of the one person in the Petersburg literary world thoroughly in tune with the writing he had been producing after
Poor Folk
, but the memory of Valerian Maikov was kept alive by the close ties Dostoevsky had established with the Maikov family. Their home was the center of a literary-artistic salon at which Dostoevsky, despite his notorious explosiveness, was a frequent and welcome guest. His affection for Valerian was transferred to Apollon, a slightly older brother who had already acquired some reputation as a poet and who was to remain the most loyal of Dostoevsky’s few intimates in later years.

Valerian Maikov’s vigorous defense of his friend’s literary talent also represented an effort to advance beyond Belinsky as a cultural critic. Hostile to the remnants of German Romantic and Idealistic thought still lurking in the background of Belinsky’s criticism, Maikov proposed to replace them with an empirical foundation drawn from psychology. Art, he said, was grounded in what he called “the law of sympathy,” according to which man understands everything by comparison with himself; he absorbs the world and domesticates it to his feeling (in art) and his understanding (in science and philosophy).
⁸
Psychology—the study of the inner life of man—thus becomes the key offering access to the secrets of the universe. Maikov shared Fourier’s preoccupation with the human psyche as an all-important realm that had never been adequately explored.

It is likely that Maikov’s friendship with the famous and slightly older Dostoevsky had something to do with the formulation of such a critical program, and it is no accident that Maikov’s essays contain the most perceptive comments about Dostoevsky made by any of his contemporaries. “Both Gogol and Dostoevsky depict existing society,” he writes. “But Gogol is preeminently a social poet, while Dostoevsky is preeminently a psychological one. For the first, the individual is important as the representative of a certain society or a certain group; for the second, society itself is interesting because of its influence on the personality of the individual. . . . Dostoevsky gives us a strikingly artistic depiction of Russian society, but with him this provides only the background of the picture, and is . . . completely swallowed up by the importance of the psychological interest.”
⁹

After
Poor Folk
, society appears largely as it is refracted through the consciousness of Dostoevsky’s characters; and while Belinsky disapproved of such internalization, Maikov welcomed it not only as the natural flowering of Dostoevsky’s gifts but also as an epistemological insight into the nature of reality. “In
The Double
,” writes Maikov, “he penetrates so deeply into the human soul, he looks so fearlessly and passionately into the secret machinations of human
feeling, thought, and action, that the impression created by
The Double
may be compared only with that of an inquisitive person penetrating into the chemical composition of matter.” Such a “chemical view of society,” he continues, goes so deep that it seems to be “suffused with some sort of mystical light,” but there is nothing “mystical” here at all, and the depiction of reality is as “positive” as can be.
¹⁰
Flatly rejecting any prescriptive function for criticism, Maikov declares that “fidelity to reality constitutes such an essential condition for every work of art that a person gifted with artistic talent never produces anything contrary to this condition.” Hence, it is superfluous to impose restrictions and demands on artistic creation in the name of “reality.”
¹¹

The quarrel with Belinsky that Maikov initiated actually went to the heart of the ideological split between those who still clung to the moral-religious inspiration of Utopian Socialism and those who, like Belinsky, were searching for a more “positive” foundation for their social-political convictions. Maikov’s position comes out explicitly in the major article in
Notes of the Fatherland
that announced his literary program and launched the attack against Belinsky. One quotation from Maikov’s argument about free will and moral responsibility—the same question that Dostoevsky recalled arguing about with Belinsky at just that moment—will illustrate the social-cultural significance of the debate. To clinch his point that man cannot simply be seen as a creature of his conditioning, Maikov appeals to the example of Jesus Christ: “Christ reveals himself as the most perfect image of what we call a great personality. His true doctrine stands in such radical opposition to the ideas of the ancient world, and contains such an immeasurable independence from phenomena fateful for millions of beings called free and reasonable—in a word, they are elevated to such a degree above the laws of historical phenomena, that mankind even to this day . . . has not yet grown up even to half of that independence of thought without which it is impossible to comprehend and to realize them. Such independence, in an incomparably lesser degree, is shown in the ideas of all those truly great people who are responsible for moral revolutions of lesser scope.”
¹²