Dostoevsky (61 page)

Nothing had been decided when, in December 1859, Dostoevsky arrived in St. Petersburg. His family had rented an apartment for him and his new wife and stepson, furnished it as best they could, and even hired a cook, who eagerly awaited their appearance because it frightened her to live there alone. Other people, more discreetly, were also watching for the arrival of the Dostoevskys. The military governor-general of Petersburg wrote the Petersburg chief of police on December 2 that, by order of the tsar, the secret surveillance under which ex-ensign Dostoevsky had been kept in Tver was to be continued on his homecoming to the capital.

Dostoevsky’s return to the scene of his early literary triumphs was celebrated only in the small circle of his intimates. Dr. Yanovsky recalled that “in Petersburg
we all . . . were at his housewarming: there were Apollon Maikov, Alexander Milyukov, his brother Mikhail with his family, many others, and also Speshnev, who had gotten into Petersburg that very day.”
⁷
Dostoevsky was thus again unexpectedly brought face-to-face with the man he had once called his “Mephistopheles” and who, in the entourage of the governor-general of Eastern Siberia, Nikolay Muravyev, had himself just returned from exile. Muravyev was an energetic administrator with liberal pretensions who enjoyed rubbing elbows with such political exiles as his second cousin Mikhail Bakunin. He had appointed Speshnev editor of a local, government-sponsored journal in Irkutsk, and attached him to his personal staff. During his sojourn in St. Petersburg, Muravyev succeeded in having Speshnev’s rights as a nobleman restored. Bakunin, who by this time had escaped from Siberia largely as a result of Muravyev’s laxity, had also been much impressed with Speshnev, who had come to Petersburg to examine personally the leaders of the new radical generation. As Pleshcheev writes to Dobrolyubov: “Today, on my name day, I was overjoyed not only by your letter, but also by the visit of a man very close to my heart—Speshnev; he is traveling from Siberia with Muravyev and will unfailingly be at Chernyshevsky’s, whom he wants to meet. I also gave him your address. I recommend him as a person. . . . He is in the highest degree an upright character with a will of iron. It can absolutely be said that, among us all—he was the most remarkable figure.”
⁸

There is, regrettably, no word from Dostoevsky of his impressions of Speshnev after their long years of separation. We must be content to imagine Dostoevsky’s thoughts as he greeted the man who had once lured him along the dangerous path of revolutionary adventure. Both would have been able to rejoice, at any rate, that their great dream of the liberation of the serfs was on the point of being realized; both could congratulate each other that their sacrifices had not been in vain. Whether they would have agreed on anything else is highly questionable, but in those days of rapturous expectation, when all Russia was poised on the edge of the great new challenge of freedom, it made very little difference.

Everything seemed possible then, and for a few years—a very few—all shades of social-political opinion were united as never before by the prospect of impending change. It was not a government sycophant but the intransigent Chernyshevsky himself who had recently declared in
The Contemporary
(February 1858) that “the new life, which now begins for us, will be as much more beautiful, prosperous, brilliant, and happy, in comparison with our former life, as the last one hundred and fifty years were superior to the seventeenth century in
Russia.”
⁹
It may be doubted whether Chernyshevsky himself meant such words to be taken with entire literalness, but no matter—they reflect and express a mood prevalent among all sections of the Russian intelligentsia in those glorious days when “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”

All were joined together in favor of liberation and reform and against the hardened and selfish reactionaries who opposed the beneficent measures proposed by the tsar to ameliorate the body politic. The little group who came to celebrate Dostoevsky’s return all shared in this celebratory mood, and there was no sense as yet that the ally of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov could not also, at the same time, remain the friend of Dostoevsky and Maikov. It would take a few short years to bring matters to a head and to make personal relations of this kind, or at least the old cordiality, forever impossible. But tensions had not yet gone that far, and it should be said that Dostoevsky would honestly try in the future, even if unsuccessfully, to keep them from reaching this point of rupture.

A feeling of celebration was thus everywhere in the air at that moment of Russian history, and Dostoevsky had ample reasons of his own for a sense of buoyancy and jubilation. The Siberian cycle of his life, which began when he left St. Petersburg in shackles, had now been completed. Despite his epilepsy and the disappointments of his marriage, he had managed to survive, and even to thrive, in the onerous years he had just lived through, emerging from his worst ordeal—the four years in the prison camp—with the conviction that he had acquired new powers there both as a writer and as a man.

He knew he would no longer write “trifles” and that he could face whatever fate had in store for him, if not with serenity, then at least with unflinching courage: he had been tried and not found wanting. He had begun to publish again and never doubted for a moment, whatever the relative failure of his fledgling efforts, that he would once again regain his literary eminence. His head and his notebooks were full of plans for new stories, novels, and essays, and he was certain that his unique experiences had given him invaluable insights into the soul of the Russian people that only he could communicate. As the prospective editor of a monthly journal, he was about to throw himself into the fray at the most exciting and tumultuous moment of Russian culture during the nineteenth century. A new life was just beginning for him—the life of literature, for which he had longed so desperately as a convict and a soldier—and he could hardly wait to get to work.

And work he would, in the next five years, as literary editor and chief contributor to his own journals—reading manuscripts, interviewing and writing to contributors, correcting proof, and, all the while, turning out a flow of copy
with a fecundity, a prolificity, an abundance little short of astonishing if we remember that he was incapacitated for days at a time by the constant recurrence of his epilepsy. These were the years in which he wrote two major books (
The Insulted and Injured
and
House of the Dead
), three short works of fiction (including
Notes from Underground
), a lively series of travel sketches of Europe (
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
), and produced, in addition, a continual flow of literary essays and polemical journalism.

—But all this takes us into the thick of the next part, and we should not encroach on it any further. Let us end the narrative of this portion of Dostoevsky’s life at the joyous moment when his old friends have gathered round to greet the returning exile and drink his health and happiness. Let us take leave of him before the spontaneous conviviality of this reunion has been fractured by ideological enmity, before the burdens he is about to assume have begun to weigh him down, and while he is still basking in the heady exuberance of his homecoming.

¹
Pis’ma
, 1: 270; October 23, 1859.

²
Ibid., 2: 603.

³
Ibid., 605; October 9, 1859.

⁴
A. A. Kornilov,
Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie pri Alexander II
(Moscow, 1909), 31.

⁵
Pis’ma
, 2: 593; September 13, 1858.

⁶
Ibid., 1: 286; November 12, 1859.

⁷
See the fragment of Yanovsky’s unpublished letter to A. G. Dostoevsky in
LN
86 (1973), 377.

⁸
DMI
, 490–491.

⁹
Cited in William F. Woehrlin,
Chernyshevskii: The Man and the Journalist
(Cambridge, MA, 1971), 193.

Dostoevsky’s presence in St. Petersburg was soon noticed by the larger literary fraternity in which he was so eager to resume his place. Just a few days after establishing residence, he was elected a member of the newly founded Society for Aid to Needy Writers and Scholars, usually called the Literary Fund. Dostoevsky lent his support to the activities of the fund, and not only through his participation in the numerous readings and events that the society organized to fill its coffer. Difficult as it is to imagine, he also performed the tasks of an efficient and conscientious administrator. Elected secretary of the fund’s administrative committee in 1863, he kept the records of the meetings and handled the considerable correspondence of this organization with skill and dispatch.

The very first benefit organized by the Literary Fund took place on January 10, 1860, and Dostoevsky would certainly have been attracted by the program, which announced a reading by Turgenev of his newly written, deeply meditative, and highly controversial essay, “Hamlet and Don Quixote,” a work that marked an important moment in the social-cultural debate of the early 1860s. An amicable exchange of notes between the two a few months after the benefit reveals that the rancorous breakup of their friendship in 1845 had been, at least for the moment, forgotten. Dostoevsky thoroughly absorbed the essay, whose ideas left significant traces on his own thinking and on his image of the self-sacrificing Don Quixote type in Prince Myshkin. For Turgenev’s famous pages proved to be a panegyric of the man of faith, Don Quixote, who is held up for admiration in preference to the worldly, skeptical, disillusioned Hamlet, “sick-lied o’er by the pale cast of thought.” Don Quixote is inspired by an ideal greater than himself (even if a comically deluded one), and this elevates him to a moral superiority that towers over the indecisive Hamlet.

Turgenev pretended to be dissecting two eternal psychological types that always had existed in human nature; but everyone knew that the Hamlets of Russian literature were the “superfluous men,” the well-meaning but powerless and hopelessly impractical members of the gentry liberal intelligentsia. The Don Quixotes, on the other hand, were those who had died on the European barricades in 1848 (like the protagonist of Turgenev’s own
Rudin
) and those members of the younger generation in Russia ready once again to sacrifice themselves for
the cause of the people. So as not to leave any doubt concerning the implications of his categories, Turgenev mentions both the Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier and, for good measure, Jesus Christ as examples of the Don Quixote type. Perhaps intending to mollify the hostility of the younger radical publicists like Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, Turgenev now indicates agreement with much of their indictment of the Russian Hamlets. But, as we shall see, their antagonism to his work was too deeply rooted in the social-cultural situation to be so easily overcome.

In April 1860, Dostoevsky himself came into public view as a participant in some amateur theatricals organized by the Literary Fund. Pisemsky had hit on the idea of presenting plays with celebrated literary figures filling the roles, and Dostoevsky was invited to join the fun in the role of the postmaster Shpekin in Gogol’s
The Inspector-General
. The evening was a howling success; all cultivated Petersburg turned out to see the notorious lions of literature disporting themselves behind the footlights. So much laughter was provoked by the appearance of Turgenev, Kraevsky, and Maikov—arrived to present their “gifts” to the supposed inspector-general and to complain about the depredations of the governor—that those who wished to enjoy the play protested publicly against the unseemly uproar. Among these indignant spectators was the Grand Prince Konstantin Nikolaevich, the brother of the tsar, who was known to have worked behind the scenes in favor of the abolition of serfdom, and who had also come to catch a glimpse of the literary luminaries. “I do not believe,” writes the journalist Peter Weinberg (with whom Dostoevsky would soon cross swords), “that anyone familiar with Feodor Mikhailovich in the last years of his life could possibly imagine him as a comic . . . knowing how to stimulate a pure Gogolian laughter; but it was really so, and Dostoevsky-Shpekin was . . . faultless.”
¹