Dostoevsky (64 page)

17. F. M. Dostoevsky, 1861

Strakhov also stresses the complete absorption of Dostoevsky and his collaborators in the internecine warfare which, at that agitated moment, imparted so much unaccustomed animation to the Russian periodical press. To be an editor then was an invigorating endeavor. A journal like
Time
was invariably in the center of a cross fire, and nothing was more important than to know who was a friend and who a foe. “Dostoevsky, Apollon Grigoryev, and I could be certain that, in each new issue of a journal, we would invariably come across our names. The rivalry between various journals, the intense attention given to their tendency, the polemics—all this turned the job of journalism into such an interesting game that, once having experienced it, you could not help but feel a great desire to plunge into it again.”
²⁰

Despite his own career as a publicist, Strakhov harbored an unconquerable disdain for the rough-and-tumble of journalistic infighting. He had, as he remarks proudly, belonged to a literary circle of the 1840s for which “the very summit of culture would have been
to understand Hegel and to know Goethe by heart
.”
²¹
These two names (especially the latter) had become symbols for a social-cultural attitude
au-dessus de la mêlée
, of a concern with “eternal” issues far removed from the petty disputes of day-by-day social existence; and Strakhov was shocked, on his first contact with the Milyukov Circle, to find himself exposed to a wholly different point of view. The tendency in this circle, which Dostoevsky had joined soon after his return from exile, “had been formed under the influence of French literature. Political and social questions were thus in the foreground, and swallowed up purely artistic interests. The artist, according to this view, should investigate the evolution of society and bring to consciousness the good and evil coming to birth in its midst; he should, as a result, be a teacher, denouncer, guide. Hence it almost directly followed that eternal and general interests had to be subordinated to transient and political ones. Feodor Mikhailovich was totally steeped in this publicist tendency and remained faithful to it until the end of his life.”
²²

Dostoevsky’s passion for journalism derived from the desire to remain in touch with the burgeoning social-cultural issues of his time and to use them for artistic purposes. He made no distinction, unlike the more pretentious Strakhov, between what Goethe called “the demands of the day” and those of his literary career. “I rather looked at journalism cross-eyed,” Strakhov admits, “and approached it with some haughtiness.”
²³
Precisely because Dostoevsky made no distinction between “eternal” issues and those of the current scene—because he could sense the permanently significant in and through the immediate and seemingly ephemeral—he was ultimately capable of writing those ideological novels that constitute his chief claim to glory.

Dostoevsky effortlessy came into close personal contact during these years with a wide range of Russian social-cultural opinion. Indeed, he could see all its nuances embodied in the flesh as he spoke to the youthful members of the younger generation who swarmed into the editorial offices of his journal and who, if they were lucky, were invited to attend editorial meetings where manuscripts were read aloud and final decisions taken.
Time
was constantly on the lookout for new young writers and remained unusually receptive to their fledgling efforts. Many names later well known, some in the annals of the extreme left wing (such as P. N. Tkachev), published their first work under Dostoevsky’s aegis. “Perhaps never again in his life,” remarks V. S. Nechaeva, “would Dostoevsky
have the same chance to come into contact with young people of such diverse backgrounds and situations, but united by an interest in social and literary questions, as when he was at the head of
Time
and
Epoch
.”
²⁴

Dostoevsky’s editorial policy attempted to combine a sympathy for the aspirations of the predominantly radical youth for social justice and political reform with an unremitting hostility to the aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical tenets of radical ideology. This effort to reconcile the irreconcilable led to inevitable tensions between the various groups of contributors to
Time
, who made up two opposing factions. At the center of one was the tempestuous Grigoryev, with Strakhov as a fellow-traveler, “though,” writes Strakhov, “his emotions were not at all stirred by the search for
pochva
, but rather by an implacable hatred of materialism.”
²⁵
On the other side, most of the young radicals gathered around A. E. Razin, the self-educated son of a peasant serf family and the author of a popular introduction to a scientific view of the universe for schoolchildren entitled
God’s World
, who was, in addition, a close friend of Dobrolyubov. Between the two was a group composed of the Dostoevsky brothers and the survivors of the gentry liberal circles of the 1840s—Milyukov, Pleshcheev, Apollon Maikov, and others less well-known.
²⁶

Grigoryev left Petersburg in the spring of 1861 in part because of dissatisfaction with the editorial policy of
Time
; in particular with Dostoevsky’s refusal to attack more vigorously the radicals on
The Contemporary
—Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. Dissatisfied as well with Dostoevsky’s relatively mild rebuttal of Dobrolyubov’s views on art, Strakhov admits, “I could not contain myself and I wished to come as quickly as possible into a straightforward and decisive relationship with Nihilist doctrines. . . . I regarded its appearance in literature with great indignation.”
²⁷
Dostoevsky did not share the same animus, and his observations of the current scene reveal the extremely unstable synthesis he was trying to work out between a sympathetic and a critical attitude toward the radicals. Much attention is given by Dostoevsky to the relative freedom of the press that had permitted the rise of an “accusatory literature” (for example, Saltykov-Shchedrin’s
Provincial Sketches
) exposing abuses. Such writing had recently come under attack from both the Right (which did not relish the criticism of existing conditions) and the Left (which believed that such criticism did not go far enough).
The Contemporary
, in the person of Dobrolyubov, had made a point of ridiculing complacent liberal journalists who, while pillorying minor bureaucratic misdeeds, refused to utter a word about the system as a whole or to suggest that a total transformation of society was necessary to remedy the outrages they
reported. Dostoevsky tries to steer prudently through these dangerous shoals, indicating his approval of what he calls “beneficent publicity” on the one hand but without expressing any indignation at the jibes of the radicals on the other. While keeping his distance on all matters of substance, he thus displays in this discreet and allusive fashion at least a sympathetic tolerance for the radical position in the social-cultural skirmishes of the early 1860s.

Only in the last two sections of the first number of
Time
, however, do the limits of Dostoevsky’s agreement with the radicals begin to emerge more conspicuously. On the issue of literacy, Dostoevsky insists that it is the obligation of the upper class to take the lead in making such literacy accessible, and this duty leads him into some reflections on the “superfluous men”—members of the gentry liberal intelligentsia—who were then under heavy attack from the radicals. Not content with their sarcastic sallies against the characters of Turgenev’s stories and novels, the attack had been continued, with mounting ferocity, by Dobrolyubov, and had recently reached a crescendo in his sensational article, “What Is Oblomovism?” (the term coined by Goncharov to describe the lethargy of his protagonist, Oblomov). Listing the most famous examples of superfluous men in Russian literature, all the greatest creations of the best-known writers—Pushkin’s Onegin, Lermontov’s Pechorin, Herzen’s Beltov, Turgenev’s Rudin—Dobrolyubov had described them without exception as blood brothers of the supine Oblomov.
²⁸

The complaint made by the superfluous men had always been that conditions in Russia offered no arena for the employment of their abilities. But with the liberation of the serfs in 1862, a life of honorable action inside Russia was possible, and indeed had become a task devolving on all men of good will. Even Herzen was ready to agree that “the day of the Onegins and the Pechorins is over. . . . One who does not find work now has no one else to blame for it.”
²⁹
Dobrolyubov had insisted that the entire class of gentry liberals should be thrown into the discard, but Herzen had argued that they could still be useful. Essentially, this was also Dostoevsky’s opinion; where the two men differed was in their notion of what “work” and “usefulness” implied in the new post-liberation Russia.

Herzen always remained a radical revolutionary, and “work” for him did not mean the end of his hostility to a regime that he opposed on principle in the name of democratic Socialism. For Dostoevsky, on the other hand, the time had come for the superfluous men, those fine flowers of the Russian intelligentsia
(among whom he would later number Herzen himself), to devote themselves to the humdrum task of bettering the lot of their fellow Russians. Suppose, Dostoevsky writes mockingly, each of these gentlemen undertakes to teach just one child how to read. Such a proposal, of course, would shock their pretensions, and Dostoevsky conveys their horrified response in his ironically dialogic manner: “Is that an activity for people like us! . . . we who conceal titanic powers in our breast! We wish to, and can, move mountains; from our hearts flows the purest well-spring of love for all humanity. . . . It’s impossible to take a five-inch step when we wish to walk in seven-league boots! Can a giant teach a child to read?” To which Dostoevsky replies in his own voice: “There it is: sacrifice all your titanism to the general good; take a five-inch step instead of a seven-league one; accept wholeheartedly the idea that if you are unable to advance further, five inches is all the same worth more than nothing. Sacrifice everything, even your grandeur and your great ideas, for the general good; stoop down, stoop down, as low as the level of a child” (18: 68).

The intelligentsia is thus enjoined to subdue its pretensions and to do what it can within the limits of a possibility bounded by the existing (but greatly transformed) social-political situation. Such an injunction will determine Dostoevsky’s immitigable opposition to all attempts to stir up what he firmly believed could only be futile and self-destructive revolutionary unrest.

¹
G. M. Fridlender,
F. M. Dostoevsky—materialy i issledovaniya
, 6 vols. (Leningrad, 1974–1983), 4: 243.

²
Strakhov,
Biografiya
, 204.

³
Ibid.

⁴
Wherever possible, references to Dostoevsky’s notebooks will be keyed to the texts included in the Academy of Sciences edition (
PSS
) of his works. The translations into English are indebted to those in
The Unpublished Dostoevsky
, ed. Carl Proffer, trans. by various hands, 3 vols. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1973–1976). Individual page references to the English text, however, will not be given.

⁵
The word
pochva
, whose literal meaning is “soil,” also has the accessory sense of “foundation” or “support.”

⁶
Cited in A. S. Dolinin, “F. M. Dostoevsky i N. N. Strakhov,” in
Shestidesiatye gody
, ed. N. K. Piksanov and O. V. Tsekhnovitser (Moscow, 1940), 240.

⁷
Biografiya
, 225, 195.

⁸
In B. F. Egorov, “Apollon Grigoryev—kritik,”
Uchenie Zapiski Tartuskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta
98 (1960), 194.

⁹
Cited in A. L. Volynsky,
Russkie kritiki
(St. Petersburg, 1896), 684.

¹⁰
V. G. Selitrennikova and I. G. Yakushkin, “Apollon Grigoryev i Mitya Karamazov,”
Filologicheskie Nauki
1 (1969), 13–24.