Dostoevsky (76 page)

Quite opposite was the reaction of Dimitry Pisarev, the chief critic of
The Russian Word
, a journal that had been considered a staunch ally of
The Contemporary
. Strakhov noted in the young critic a tendency to draw the most extreme conclusions from the lessons of Chernyshevsky—the very same “Nihilist” conclusions that Bazarov would soon be proclaiming in Turgenev’s pages. Pisarev naturally found Turgenev’s hero completely to his taste, and he welcomed precisely those aspects of Bazarov considered defamatory by Antonovich as distinctive of the new “hero of our time.” Pavel Petrovich once refers to Bazarov as possessing a “satanic pride,” and Pisarev hastens to agree that “this expression is very felicitously chosen and is a perfect characterization of our hero.”
¹²
Bazarov also trumpets a worldview based on an “empiricism” that reduces all matters of principle to individual preference, and Pisarev blithely accepts such a doctrine as the very last word of “science.” “Thus Bazarov everywhere and in everything does only what he wishes, or what seems to him useful and attractive. He is governed only by personal caprice or personal calculation. Neither over him, nor outside him, nor inside him does he recognize any regulator, any moral law, any principle. . . . Nothing except personal taste prevents him from murdering and robbing, and nothing except personal taste stirs people of this stripe to make discoveries in the field of science and social existence.”
¹³
Three years later, Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment
will show what might occur when this interpretation of the Bazarov type is admiringly put to the test.

All through Pisarev’s article, particular stress is placed on Bazarov’s grandeur as an
individual
, who towers not only above all other member of the educated class but even more above the people. As a result, Pisarev is sensitive to
Bazarov’s moral-spiritual isolation and even casts it in the form of a universal social law:

Nothing similar can be found in
The Contemporary
, where the intelligentsia and the people were invariably considered to be united in the attainment of a common social-political goal. The image of the transcendent
raznochinets
hero who acts alone and who cannot help but feel
contempt
for the people whose lives he wishes to ameliorate and elevate was something genuinely new on the Russian social-cultural scene. Whatever the satisfaction afforded by Pisarev’s praise, Turgenev could hardly have recognized his own complex conception in this celebration of a Bazarov beyond good and evil, a type that had become glorified almost to the dimensions of a Nietzschean superman. And there can be little doubt that it set Dostoevsky’s imagination working along the lines eventually leading to Raskolnikov and his article “On Crime,” which also separates the world into “ordinary” and “extraordinary” people and claims for the second category the
right
to “step over” the moral law.

Dostoevsky read
Fathers and Children
on its magazine publication, at the beginning of March, and conveyed his admiration to Turgenev without delay. He received a reply before the month was out expressing Turgenev’s gratitude and satisfaction: “You have so fully and sensitively grasped what I wished to express in Bazarov. . . . It is as if you had slipped into my soul and intuited even what I did not think necessary to utter. I hope to God . . . everyone sees even a part of what you have seen!”
¹⁵
A month later, he writes to Dostoevsky again: “no one, it seems, suspected that I tried to present him [Bazarov] as a tragic figure—and everyone says: why is he so bad?—or—why is he so good?”
¹⁶

Dostoevsky’s original letter has been lost, but a hint of what Dostoevsky had written Turgenev is given in a few sentences that he set down a year later in
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
, when he refers to Turgenev’s “restless and tormented Bazarov (the mark of a great heart) in spite of all his Nihilism” (5: 59). Bazarov here is grasped precisely as the kind of tragic figure that Turgenev had
wished to portray, a hero whose tragedy lies in the conflict between his Western ideas (his ideology) and “the great heart,” whose impulses and longings he could not suppress or deny.

It may be assumed that Dostoevsky discussed Turgenev’s novel with Strakhov when assigning him to review it for
Time
, and Strakhov’s analysis, one of the finest contemporary reactions to the book, undoubtedly conveys a good deal of Dostoevsky’s own ideas. Appearing in the April issue, Strakhov’s article takes into account the responses of both Antonovich and Pisarev, but, in his view, both the enthusiasm of Pisarev and the hostility of Antonovich are equally mistaken for the very reason given by Turgenev himself: each poses the problem of the book in terms of whether the author was really a partisan of the fathers or the children, the past or the future. Its real meaning lies much deeper and is concerned with a far different problem.

“Never,” Strakhov writes, “has the disaccord between life and thought been felt as intensely as at the present time.”
¹⁷
It is this disaccord that Turgenev dramatizes, and it is here, rather than in the conflict of generations, that the book’s ultimate moral lesson can be located. Bazarov, as Pisarev had rightly said, is manifestly superior as an individual to all the other people in the book, fathers included. But it turns out that he is not superior to the forces of life that they embody, no matter in how paltry a form; he is not superior to the forces that he vainly tries to suppress in himself because they do not jibe with the theory about life that he accepts. Bazarov disapproves of responding to the blandishments of nature, and Turgenev depicts nature in all its beauty; Bazarov does not value friendship or romantic love, and Turgenev shows how real both are in his heart; Bazarov rejects family sentiment, and Turgenev portrays the unselfish, anguished love of his doting parents; Bazarov scorns the appeal of art, and Turgenev delineates him with all the resources of a great poetic talent. “Bazarov is a Titan revolting against his mother earth,”
¹⁸
Strakhov writes; but no Titan is powerful enough to triumph over the forces that, because they are immutably rooted in man’s emotional nature, provide the eternal foundation of human life.

Shortly after Strakhov’s article appeared, Turgenev arrived in Petersburg from Paris and hastened to pay a visit to the editorial offices of
Time
. “He found us assembled,” Strakhov recalls, “and invited Mikhail Mikhailovich, Feodor Mikhailovich, and myself to dine with him in the Hotel Clea. The storm that had blown up against him obviously upset him.”
¹⁹
Lionized by the reactionaries, vilified by the majority of the radicals, praised by Pisarev for having glorified Nihilism—it was only among the editors of
Time
, and nowhere else in Russia,
that he had found any informed sympathy with and comprehension of the greatest novel of his literary career.

Turgenev was famous for his affability as a conversationalist, and during the animated dinner-table talk at the Hotel Clea, he amused the company by recounting the dangers that awaited Russians who innocently entrusted themselves to the delights of European residence. Probably some mention had been made of Dostoevsky’s impending first trip abroad. Such a trip was a great event in the life of any educated Russian, and Dostoevsky had recently expressed his own yearnings in a letter to the poet Polonsky. “How many times . . . have I dreamt of being in Italy. Ever since the novels of Ann Radcliffe, which I read when I was eight years old, all sorts of Catarinas, Alfonsos, and Lucias have been running around in my head. . . . Then it was the turn of Shakespeare—Verona, Romeo and Juliet—the devil only knows what magic was there! Italy! Italy! But instead of Italy I landed in Semipalatinsk, and before that in the Dead House. Will I never succeed in getting to Europe while I still have the strength, the passion, and the poetry?”
²⁰

The financial situation of
Time
was now promising enough to allow him to realize this long-cherished dream; and he also desired to consult specialists in Europe about his epilepsy. He writes to his brother Andrey that he is traveling without his wife, partly for lack of funds, partly because Marya Dimitrievna wished to supervise Pasha’s preparation for the entrance examinations to the gymnasium. The plan was for Dostoevsky to join up with Strakhov, also making a first trip to Europe, in mid-July. On June 7, 1862, he left for the first of what were to be many
Wanderjahren
in Europe.

The first leg of Dostoevsky’s trip took him from Russia through Germany, Belgium, and France to Paris, where he planned to spend a month. Some of the observations he garnered along the way can be found in his
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
, written the following year and published in
Time
. This series of articles, despite its title, is filled with the most serious cultural and social-political reflections, even though such ideas appear in the midst of casual travel sketches whose lighthearted tone communicates a deceptive air of frivolity. For all his attempts to amuse and distract, these sketches nonetheless help us to understand important aspects of Dostoevsky’s first reactions to the spectacle of European life.

His initial impressions of Berlin, Dresden, and Cologne were all disillusioning, and after the requisite sightseeing he rushed on to Paris “in the hope that the French would be kinder and more interesting” (5: 48–49). Before arriving in
Paris, however, he paused along the way—very probably at Wiesbaden, with its inviting roulette casino—to try his luck at gambling. What happened on this first fling remains obscure; but Strakhov believes that Dostoevsky quickly acquired eleven thousand francs, and suggests that this easy win pushed him along the path to perdition.
²¹
A later letter from Mikhail, informing his brother that he was forwarding some money from a publisher, indicates that Dostoevsky was again short of cash. “For God’s sake, don’t gamble any more,” his brother pleads. “How can you gamble considering our luck?”
²²
This episode was the first symptom of Dostoevsky’s addiction to roulette, which was to grip him so strongly in the future.

Paris was the Mecca for all Russian tourists—whether those, like Herzen and Bakunin, who came to worship at the hallowed shrine of revolutionary upheaval or those, more numerous, who hastened to kick up their heels at the Bal Mabille and chase
grisettes
in the Latin Quarter. It was mid-June when he reached Paris—after first catching a disturbing whiff of the political climate in the Second Empire when four French police spies, with the assignment of inspecting all entering foreigners and telegraphing descriptions to the proper authorities, boarded the train and took seats in his compartment. He remained in Paris for two weeks, long enough to soak up the atmosphere of order and propriety, and he labels the city—jestingly, of course—“the most moral and virtuous city on the face of the earth” (5: 68). “The Parisian loves to do business, but it seems that even in doing business and in skinning you alive in his shop like a chicken, he skins you not, as in the old days, for the sake of profit, but out of virtue, in the name of some sacred necessity” (5: 76).

Following in the footsteps of Herzen, who had diagnosed the French bourgeoisie as reflected in the plays of Eugene Scribe, Dostoevsky hastened to the theater to investigate how this image has evolved. In all of the plays by Dumas
fils
, Augier, Sardou, and the indefatigable Scribe, Dostoevsky found characters of unutterable nobility and impeccable virtue; all concern a young man who, in the first act, renounces a fortune for the highest motives, only to end in the last act by invariably marrying a poor girl who suddenly inherits incalculable wealth—unless it finally turns out that he, instead of being a penniless orphan, is really the legitimate son of a Rothschild. After seeing the sights, and consulting various medical authorities about his epilepsy, Dostoevsky summed up his impressions of the French in a letter to Strakhov a day before leaving for London. “By God!” he wrote. “The French are a nauseating people. . . . The Frenchman is pleasant, honest, polite, but false, and money for him is everything. No trace of any ideal.”
²³
Since Dostoevsky’s words coincide so perfectly with the
portrait of the French given by the much more urbane and cosmopolitan Herzen in his sparkling
Letters from France and Italy
, we may view them as just another example of a recurring Russian reaction to bourgeois French life.
²⁴