The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (121 page)

Biography had recently created citadels of uniqueness. When the biographer “plunged” he found a peculiarly troubled, frustrated, or ambitious person. What Dostoyevsky saw was a responsible soul, free to choose and take the consequences. Unlike his progressive Western contemporaries, he did not see men as rational beings pursuing social and material ends but as the work of a Creator. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). To this soul Dostoyevsky gave a role in a world of good and evil, dazzled by a bewildering panorama of choices, of crimes and acts of mercy. And he cast his modern dramas of freedom in the ancient vocabulary of Western religion.

In his appreciation of Dostoyevsky as “one of the supreme novelists of the world” Somerset Maugham says he was “vain, envious, quarrelsome, suspicious, cringing, selfish, boastful, unreliable, inconsiderate, narrow and intolerant. In short, he had an odious character.” By what alchemy did this odious character create novels revealing the grandeur, the struggles and tenderness of the Russian soul?

While Turgenev and Tolstoy were born into the educated landed classes, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born to a poor and pious retired army surgeon working in a Moscow hospital. As a boy he played in the cheerless garden among patients in hospital garb, whom his father had forbidden him to address. These sick made indelible impressions on him. A girl of nine years, one of Fyodor’s closest friends, was found raped in the hospital yard, and she died shortly afterward, providing an episode that would recur in his novels. But there were other memories, too, of evenings the family spent reading aloud from patriotic Russian literature and Pushkin, from Gothic novels, from Homer, Cervantes, and Scott. And he remembered “the profound effect on my spiritual development” of the rare occasion when his father took the family to see a performance of Schiller’s play
The Robbers
.

Despite his claims to the contrary Dostoyevsky was no proletarian. His family held minor noble rank, which had been lost when an ancestor refused to convert to Catholicism, and then regained in 1828. This entitled Dr. Dostoyevsky to own property with serfs, and in 1831, when Fyodor was only ten, his father bought a tiny village outside of Moscow. “You must know,” Dostoyevsky explained nostalgically in the voice of the saintly Alyosha near the end of
The Brothers Karamazov
, “that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home … some good sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.”

After schooling in Moscow he was sent to a military engineering school in St. Petersburg. There he found respite from drill, from the hazing, and from studying the science of fortifications, by sitting up nights reading his
beloved Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe. Besides Pushkin, Gogol, and the other Russian writers, he also took refuge in Gothic novels, in Rousseau, Byron, and Schiller, and popular novelists like Scott, Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Sue. He translated Balzac’s
Eugénie Grandet
, and then announced his intention to write a novel of similar length himself. When Dostoyevsky completed the engineering course in 1843 he had decided to be a writer, and resigned his commission. The
Poor Folk
that had brought him sudden acclaim was his first product. But the novel that followed,
The Double
(1846), on the split-personality theme he would explore again and again, was not well received.

Meanwhile the Belinsky clique drew Dostoyevsky into a circle of reformers attracted by Western models, and they secretly conspired against czarist autocracy. It was an era, as the acute French traveler the Marquis de Custine observed, when “At Petersburg, to lie is still to perform the part of a good citizen; to speak the truth, even in apparently unimportant matters, is to conspire. You would lose the favor of the emperor, if you were to observe that he had a cold in his head.” With youthful enthusiasm and without reckoning the consequences, in 1847 Dostoyevsky joined the liberal Petrashevsky Circle, named after the host at whose house they met every Friday evening to discuss literature and social problems. They debated Western social theorists like Proudhon and Fourier, seeking to apply their theories to Russia. Seven of the group, including Dostoyevsky, formed an activist inner circle who planned to secure a lithograph outfit for printing their projects of reform. In Russia at the time illegal printing was a form of treason.

Mikhail Petrashevsky, the mysterious strong leader of the group, was a wealthy landowner, an atheist and a communist, who charmed Dostoyevsky and later became the God-tormented hero (Stavrogin) of
The Possessed
. He viewed Christ as simply an unsuccessful demagogue, and others had their own brands of atheism. Although Dostoyevsky seems to have entered the circle casually, he took its work seriously. “Socialists sprang from the Petrashevskys,” he later explained. “The Petrashevskys sowed many seeds. Among them was everything that existed in succeeding conspiracies … a secret press and a lithography, although of course they were not employed.”

On the morning of April 23, 1849, Dostoyevsky was awakened by police and taken to the prison at the Peter-Paul fortress. Before the lengthy commission of inquiry Dostoyevsky claimed that his subversive remarks had been unintentional and pleaded loyalty to czar and Church. The commission then condemned fifteen of the Circle, including Dostoyevsky, to be shot. The often-told story of the December morning when the condemned were
taken to be executed on the platform in Semenov Square was another melodrama worthy of a Dostoyevsky novel. Nicholas I himself had designed the sadistic details—the height of the platform of execution, the script for the clerk who preached the words of Saint Paul, “The wages of sin is death,” to each prisoner, and the final appearance of a priest to allow each condemned man to kiss the cross. A sword was broken over the heads of those of nobility, including Dostoyevsky. Then all were clothed in white burial shrouds and tied to posts where they would be shot.

As the order “Ready, aim!” was heard, drums rumbled, and the rifles were tilted upward as a courier hastened in flourishing a paper with the czar’s reprieve. The sentences were commuted to hard labor in Siberia. One of the condemned fell to his knees crying “The Good Czar! Long live our Czar!” Each was given a convict’s cap, a sheepskin coat, and felt boots for Siberia. Dostoyevsky kept his shroud for a souvenir. Back in his cell, after his initial stupor, he wrote to his brother. “Never has there seethed in me such an abundant and healthy kind of spiritual life as now. Whether it will sustain the body I do not know.… Now my life will change, I shall be born again in a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I shall not lose hope and shall keep pure my mind and heart. I shall be born again for the best. That is all my hope, all my comfort.”

The next four years laboring in chains in Siberia alongside lowborn thieves and murderers gave him ample opportunity for the suffering that he came to think he deserved. The hard labor seemed better than sedentary Petersburg for his general health, but he was periodically plagued by epileptic seizures. Here too he was an outsider, in a new role. The czar had ordered that despite Dostoyevsky’s descent from nobility, he was not to be treated differently, but the other prisoners would not have it so. As he later reported in “Grievances,” in
The House of the Dead
, they resented him as a gentleman and did not admit him to their camaraderie. His wondrous powers of imagination and survival helped him see the lice, cockroaches, chains, and labor—and even ostracism by his fellow convicts—as only proper punishment for his sin of defying the czar and the will of Holy Russia.

After these four years in Siberian prisons Dostoyevsky seemed somehow less melancholic and more affirmative in his view of life. The New Testament, the only reading permitted him in prison, had helped him to be reborn once again in a faith that dominated his later writing. “I have composed within myself a confession of faith,” he explained, “in which everything is clear and holy for me. This confession is very simple … to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more manly, and more perfect than Christ.… Furthermore, if anyone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it really was a fact that the truth was outside of Christ, I would rather remain with Christ than with
the truth.” He believed, as he had one of his characters observe, that “it is impossible for a convict to be without God.” What made prison life bearable was his faith that man was destined to imitate the suffering Christ.

Dostoyevsky’s novels, then, can be understood as a species of prison literature, to “justify the ways of God to men” (
Paradise Lost
, I, 1.26). Exercises in narrative “theodicy,” they explained God’s goodness and the need for the existence of evil. He defends God not by abstract theology but in human life. As his Russian philosophical disciple Nikolai Berdyayev (1874–1948) observed, “The existence of evil is a proof of God’s existence. If the world consisted solely and exclusively of goodness and justice, God would not be necessary, for then the world itself would be God. God exists because evil exists. And this means that God exists because freedom exists.” Which helps us understand why Dostoyevsky’s novels focus on the story of a crime as he creates the theological detective story. His question is not who “committed” the crime, but who is guilty of it. And there are countless forms of guilt. The guilt of Dmitri Karamazov, who imagined and wished the patricide, of Smerdyakov, who performed the deed, and of the sinful old Karamazov himself.

Other novels in Western literature, as André Gide observed, had been concerned “solely with relations between man and man, passion and intellect, with family, social, and class relations, but never, with the relations between the individual and his self or his God, which are to Dostoyevsky all important.” And every crime was a witness to freedom, the need of the soul to make a choice. “Consequently,” as Berdyayev noted, “he exhorts man to take suffering upon himself as an inevitable consequence of freedom.”

For Dostoyevsky, Western science and its materialism and mathematics were the denial of freedom. “What sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic,” complains the hero of
Notes from the Underground
(1864), “when it will all be a case of twice two makes four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!” “I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.” That mathematical way of looking at the world makes man no more than an “organ-stop,” or a “piano-key”! Fifteen years later, in
The Brothers Karamazov
, Father Zosima still warns us.

These years in Siberia were Dostoyevsky’s apprenticeship in the suffering that was his imitation of Christ. After the hard labor in prison, in 1854 he began serving an additional penal term as a common soldier in Semipalatinsk. There he performed his duties scrupulously, became a junior officer, and read books sent him by his brother. But where the suffering was less acute life seemed less interesting. Still he did manage to make an unfortunate marriage to a young widow who was ill with consumption and had a son. With the stigma of the ex-convict he needed official permission to do anything but breathe and serve in the army. Finally in 1859, six years of maneuvering by friends secured his release from the army and permission to return to St. Petersburg. There he refused to allow himself to be lionized as a liberal martyr. Instead he became a sycophant of Church and czar, partly from conviction, partly to secure official permission to pursue his vocation as a writer. His efforts included a patriotic poem on the birthday of the dowager empress, another on the death of Nicholas I, and public adoration of the new young czar Alexander II, to whom he pledged his life. He edited a magazine called
Vremya
(Time), which (despite his prison experience) proclaimed the uniqueness of Russia as a country without class distinctions that needed autocracy to express a monolithic people, destined to lead the world in “panhumanism.”

Dostoyevsky briefly recaptured the early celebrity of
Poor Folk
with novelized memoirs of his prison years.
The House of the Dead
(1861–62) was published serially in his magazine as the writing of a man condemned for murdering his wife. He followed it with
The Insulted and the Injured
, also published serially, one of his first accounts of a woman suffering for her unconventional love. But he already envisioned a great epic. “The basic idea of the art of the nineteenth century,” he wrote, “is the rehabilitation of the oppressed social pariah, and perhaps toward the end of the century this idea will be embodied in some great work as expressive of our age as the
Divine Comedy
was of the Middle Ages.”

When
Vremya
was banned by the censor for an unpatriotic article, in 1862 Dostoyevsky borrowed enough money for his first trip abroad. There he rendezvoused with a woman contributor to his magazine, sought treatment for his epilepsy, and tried his fortune at the Wiesbaden gambling tables. On his return he started another magazine in which he published serially his
Notes from the Underground
(1864), a kind of prologue to his great novels. Originally entitled “A Confession,” it recounts the humiliation and suffering of a forty-year-old “undergroundling” who aims not to be good or great or rich, nor to be rational, but only to affirm his independence as a human soul. It opens: