Natasha's Dance (56 page)

Karamazov,
who arrests Christ when he reappears in Counter-reformation Spain. Interrogating his prisoner, the Grand Inquisitor argues that the only way to prevent human suffering is, not by Christ’s example, which ordinary mortals are too weak to follow, but by the construction of a rational order which can secure, by force if necessary, the peace and happiness that people really want. But Dostoevsky’s faith was not of the sort that could be reached by
any
reasoning. He condemned as ‘Western’ all faiths which sought a reasoned understanding of Divinity or which had to be enforced by papal laws and hierarchies (and in this sense the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor was itself intended by Dostoevsky as an argument against the Roman Church). The ‘Russian God’ in which Dostoevsky believed could only be arrived at by a leap of faith: it was a mystical belief outside of all reasoning. As he wrote in 1854, in one of the rare statements of his own religious credo, ‘if someone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it
really
was that the truth lay outside Christ, I would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth’.
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    In Dostoevsky’s view, the ability to continue to believe in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence was a peculiarly Russian gift. There is a scene in
The Brothers Karamazov
where Karamazov’s servant Smerdyakov is holding forth on the question of God at a family dinner. In a confused effort to refute the Gospels, Smerdyakov says that nobody can move a mountain to the sea - except ‘perhaps two hermits in the desert’.

    ’One moment!’ screamed Karamazov in a transport of delight. ‘So you think there are two men who can move mountains, do you? Ivan, make a note of this extraordinary fact, write it down. There you have the Russian all over!’
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    Like Karamazov, Dostoevsky took delight in this ‘Russian faith’, this strange capacity to believe in miracles. It was the root of his nationalism and his messianic vision of the ‘Russian soul’ as the spiritual saviour of the rationalistic West, which ultimately led him, in the 1870s, to write in the nationalist press about the ‘holy mission’ of ‘our great Russia’ to build a Christian empire on the continent. The simple Russian people, Dostoevsky claimed, had found the solution to the intellectual’s torment over faith. They needed their belief, it was central

    to their lives, and it gave them strength to go on living and endure their suffering. This was the source of Dostoevsky’s faith as well - the urge to go on believing, despite his doubts, because faith was necessary for life; rationalism led only to despair, to murder or to suicide - the fate of all the rationalists in his novels. Dostoevsky’s answer to the voice of doubt and reason was a sort of existential
‘credo ergo sum’
that took its inspiration from those ‘Russian types’ - hermits, mystics, Holy Fools and simple Russian peasants - imaginary and real, whose faith stood beyond reasoning.

    Dostoevsky’s Orthodoxy was inseparable from his belief in the redemptive quality of the Russian peasant soul. In all his novels the quest of the ‘Great Sinner’ for a ‘Russian faith’ is intimately linked to the idea of salvation through reconciliation with the native soil. Dostoevsky’s own salvation came to him in the Siberian prison camp where for the first time he came into close contact with the common Russian people, and this theme of penance and redemption was a leitmotif in all his later works. It is the central theme of
Crime and Punishment,
a murder novel which conceals a political subplot. Its main protagonist, Raskolnikov, tries to justify his senseless murder of the old pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna using the same utilitarian reasoning as that used by the nihilists and revolutionaries: that the old woman had been ‘useless’ to society and that he, meanwhile, was poor. He thus persuades himself that he killed the pawnbroker for altruistic reasons, just as the revolutionaries legitimized their crimes, when in fact, as he comes to realize with the help of his lover and spiritual guide, the prostitute Sonya, he killed her to demonstrate his superiority. Like Caesar and Napoleon, he had believed himself exempt from the rules of ordinary morality. Raskolnikov confesses to his crime. He is sentenced to seven years’ hard labour in a Siberian prison camp. One warm Easter Day Sonya comes to him. By some strange force, ‘as though something had snatched at him’, Raskolnikov is hurled to Sonya’s feet, and in this act of repentance, she understands that he has learned to love. It is a moment of religious revelation:

    Her eyes began to shine with an infinite happiness; she had understood, and now she was in no doubt that he loved her, loved her infinitely, and that at last it had arrived, that moment…

    They tried to speak, but were unable to. There were tears in their eyes. Both of them looked pale and thin; but in these ill, pale faces there now gleamed the dawn of a renewed future, a complete recovery to a new life.
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    Strengthened by Sonya’s love, he turns for moral guidance to the copy of the Gospels which she had given him, and resolves to use his time in prison to start on the road to that new life.

    The suffering of such convicts had long been seen by Russian writers as a form of spiritual redemption. The journey to Siberia became a journey towards God. Gogol, for example, had envisaged that in the final volume of
Dead Souls
the old rogue Chichikov would see the light in a Siberian penal colony.
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Among the Slavophiles, the Decembrist exiles had the status of martyrs. They venerated Sergei Volkonsky as an ‘ideal Russian type’, in the words of Ivan Aksakov, because he ‘accepted all his suffering in the purest Christian spirit’.
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Maria Volkonsky was practically worshipped in the democratic circles of the mid-nineteenth century, where everybody knew by heart the poem by Nekrasov (‘Russian Women’) which compared Maria to a saint. Dostoevsky shared this veneration of the Decembrists and their suffering wives. During his own journey to Siberia, in 1850, his convoy had been met by the Decembrist wives in the Tobolsk transit camp. Even after a quarter of a century, in his recollection of this encounter in
A Writer’s Diary,
his attitude towards them was deeply reverential:

    We saw the great martyresses who had voluntarily followed their husbands to Siberia. They gave up everything: their social position, wealth, connections, relatives, and sacrificed it all for the supreme moral duty, the
freest
duty that can ever exist. Guilty of nothing, they endured for twenty-five long years everything that their convicted husbands endured. Our meeting went on for an hour. They blessed us on our new journey; they made the sign of the cross over us and gave each of us a copy of the Gospels, the only book permitted in the prison. This book lay under my pillow during the four years of my penal servitude.
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    In 1854 Dostoevsky wrote to one of these Decembrist wives, Natalia Fonvizina, with the first clear statement of the new faith he had found from his revelation in the prison camp at Omsk.

    What struck the writer most about these women was the voluntary nature of their suffering. At the centre of his faith was the notion of humility, which Dostoevsky argued was the truly Christian essence of the Russian peasantry - their ‘spiritual capacity for suffering’.
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It was the reason why they felt a natural tenderness towards the weak and poor, even towards criminals, whom villagers would help with gifts of food and clothes as they passed in convoy to Siberia. Dostoevsky explained this compassion by the idea that the peasants felt a ‘Christian sense of common guilt and responsibility towards their fellow-men’.
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This Christian sense emerged as the central theme of
The Brothers Karamazov.
At the heart of the novel stand the teachings of the elder Zosima - that ‘we are all responsible for each other’, even for the ‘murderers and robbers in the world’, and that we must all share in our common suffering. The Kingdom of Heaven, Zosima concludes, will become a reality only when everybody undergoes this ‘change of heart’ and the ‘brotherhood of man will come to pass’.
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    Dostoevsky places Zosima’s own conversion precisely at that moment when he realizes his guilt and responsibility toward the poor. Before he became a monk Zosima had been an army officer. He had fallen in love with a society beauty, who had rejected him for another man. Zosima provoked his rival to a duel. But the night before the duel a revelation came to him. In the evening Zosima had been in a foul mood. He had struck his batman twice about the face with all his strength, drawing blood, while the serf just stood there ‘stiffly to attention, his head erect, his eyes fixed blankly on me as though on parade, shuddering at every blow but not daring to raise his hands to protect himself. That night Zosima slept badly. But the next morning he woke with a ‘strange feeling of shame and disgrace’, not at the prospect of shedding blood in that day’s duel, but at the thought of his wanton cruelty to the poor batman the evening before. Suddenly he realized that he had no right to be waited on ‘by a man like me created in God’s image’. Filled with remorse, he rushed to his servant’s little room and went down on his knees to beg for his forgiveness. At the duel he let his rival shoot, and, when he missed, Zosima fired his own shot into the air and apologized to him. That day he resigned from his regiment and went into the monastery.
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    Dmitry Karamazov, another dissolute army officer, experiences a similar revelation and, in the end, comes to repent for the guilt of social privilege. Wrongly convicted of his father’s murder, Dmitry wants nevertheless to suffer in Siberia to purify himself and expiate the sins of other men. Suffering thus awakens consciousness. The revelation comes to Dmitry in a dream. During the hearings before his trial he falls asleep and finds himself in a peasant’s hut. He cannot understand why the peasants are so poor, why the mother cannot feed her baby, which continually cries. He wakes up from the dream transformed, ‘his face radiant with joy’, having at last felt a ‘change of heart’, and expressing his compassion for his fellow men.
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He knows that he is not guilty of his father’s murder, but is, he feels, to blame for the suffering of the peasants, his own serfs. Nobody can understand why Dmitry keeps muttering about the ‘poor baby’ or that it is the reason he ‘must go to Siberia!’
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But all is revealed at his trial:

    And what does it matter if I spend twenty years in the mines hacking out ore with a hammer? I’m not afraid of that at all. It’s something else that I fear now - that the new man that has arisen within me may depart. One can find a human heart there also, in the mines, under the ground, next to you, in another convict and murderer, and make friends with him. For there too one can live and love and suffer! One can breathe new light into the frozen heart of such a convict. One can wait on him for years and years and at last bring up from the thieves’ kitchen to the light of day a lofty soul, a soul that has suffered and has become conscious of its humanity, to restore life to an angel, bring back a hero! And there are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all responsible for them! Why did I dream of that ‘baby’ just then? ‘Why is the baby poor?’ That was a sign to me at that moment! It’s for the ‘baby’ that I’m going. For we are all responsible for all. For all the ‘babies’, for there are little children and big children. All of us are ‘babies’. And I’ll go there for all, for someone has to go for all.
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    Dostoevsky believed in a Church of social action and responsibility. He was critical of the official Church, which had allowed itself to become shackled by the Petrine state since the eighteenth century and, as a consequence, had lost its spiritual authority. He called on the

    Church to become more active in society. It had, he said, lost sight of its pastoral role and had shown itself to be indifferent to Russia’s major problem, the suffering of the poor. Such views were widely shared by lay theologians, like the Slavophile Khomiakov, and even by some priests in the Church hierarchy, whose writings were an influence on Dostoevsky.
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There was a common feeling that the Church was losing ground to the socialist intelligentsia and to the various sectarians and mystics who were searching for a more meaningful and socially responsible spiritual community.

    Dostoevsky’s writings must be seen in this context. He, too, was searching for such a Church, a Christian brotherhood like the Slavophiles’
sobornost’,
that would transcend the walls of the monastery and unite all the Russians in a living community of believers. His Utopia, a socio-mystical ideal, was nothing less than a theocracy. Dostoevsky advanced this idea in
The Brothers Karamazov
- in the scene where Ivan gains the approbation of the elder Zosima for his article proposing the radical expansion of the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. This was a subject of considerable topical importance at the time of the novel’s publication. Ivan argues that, contrary to the pattern of Western history, where the Roman Church was absorbed by the state, the idea of Holy Russia was to raise the state to the level of a Church. Ivan’s reforms of the courts would substitute the moral sanction of the Church for the coercive power of the state: instead of punishing its criminals, society should seek to reform their souls. Zosima rejoices at this argument. No criminal can be deterred, he argues, let alone reformed, by ‘all these sentences of hard labour in Siberian prisons’. But unlike the foreign criminal, Zosima maintains, even the most hardened Russian murderer retains sufficient faith to recognize and repent of his crime; and through this spiritual reformation, the elder predicts, not only would a member of the living Church be saved but ‘perhaps also the number of crimes themselves would diminish to a quite unbelievable extent’.
⁹⁶
From Dostoevsky’s
Notebooks
it is clear that he shared the elder’s theocratic vision (which was closely based on the writings of Optina’s Father Zedergolm) of a ‘single universal and sovereign Church’ that was destined to appear on the Russian land. ‘The star will shine in the East!’
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