Dostoevsky (117 page)
Authors: Joseph Frank
The account of their meeting and quarrel in Baden-Baden is contained in a letter from Dostoevsky to Maikov, written a month later in Geneva. “I’ll tell you candidly,” Dostoevsky begins. “Even before that [the visit] I disliked the man personally.” Dostoevsky’s discomfiture, he admits, was made worse because of his unpaid debt; but “I also dislike the aristocratically farcical embrace of his with which he starts to kiss you but offers his cheek. The horrible airs of a general.” Turgenev’s upper-class manners always had rasped on Dostoevsky’s nerves, and he will use this very detail in his withering portrait of the famous author Karmazinov (a deadly caricature of Turgenev) in
Demons
. It was not so much Turgenev’s manners, though, that now accounted for Dostoevsky’s hostility; “most important, his book
Smoke
put me out.”
50
“He criticized Russia and the Russians monstrously, horribly,” Dostoevsky writes. “Turgenev said we ought to crawl before the Germans, and that all attempts at Russianness and independence are swinishness and stupidity.” When Turgenev remarked that “he was writing a long article against Russophils and Slavophils,” Dostoevsky replied with the most quoted retort in their exchange: “I advised him, for the sake of convenience, to order a telescope from Paris. ‘What for?’ he asked. ‘It’s far from here,’ I replied. ‘Train your telescope on Russia and examine us, because otherwise it is really hard to make us out.’ ”
51
Taken aback by Dostoevsky’s sarcasm, Turgenev “got horribly angry”; and Dostoevsky then, with an air of “extraordinarily successful naïveté” momentarily abandoned his antagonistic stance and slipped into the role of reassuring fellow author: “But I really didn’t expect that all this criticism of you and the failure of
Smoke
would irritate you so much; honest to God,
it isn’t worth it
, forget about it all.” This advice only increased Turgenev’s exacerbation, and,
“turning red, he replied: ‘But I’m not at all irritated! What do you mean?’ ” Dostoevsky then finally took up his hat; but before going, “somehow, absolutely without intention,” he assures Maikov, “said what had accumulated in my soul about the Germans in three months.” As we know from Anna’s shorthand diary, this accumulation was one of undiluted bile; and Dostoevsky launched forth on a denunciation of the German people as “rogues and swindlers . . . much worse and more dishonest than ours.”
52
“Well here you go on talking about civilization,” continues Dostoevsky, “well what has civilization done for them and what can they boast of so very much as superior to us?” These words drove Turgenev into a paroxysm of rage: “He turned pale (literally: I’m not exaggerating a bit, not a bit!) and said to me: ‘In talking like that you offend me
personally
. You should know that I have settled here permanently, that I consider myself a German, not a Russian, and I’m proud of it!’ I replied: ‘I couldn’t at all have expected you would say that, and therefore please forgive me for having offended you.’ Then we parted quite politely and I vowed to myself never again to set foot at Turgenev’s.”
53
Turgenev presumably also resolved never again to set eyes on Dostoevsky, calling on him the next day at ten in the morning and leaving a card because Dostoevsky had made a point of informing him that he was never available before noon.
One other passage in the letter to Maikov is of great importance, because it leads Dostoevsky into remarks foreshadowing
The Idiot
. “And these people,” Dostoevsky declares, “boast of the fact, by the way, that they are
atheists
! He [Turgenev] declared to me that he is an atheist through and through.”
54
Whatever its origin, Turgenev’s declaration caused Dostoevsky to explode to Maikov: “But my God, Deism gave us Christ, that is, such a lofty notion of man that it cannot be comprehended without reverence, and one cannot help believing that this ideal of humanity is everlasting! And what have they, the Turgenevs, Herzens, Utins, and Chernyshevskys presented us with? Instead of the loftiest, divine beauty, which they spit on, they are so disgustingly selfish, so shamelessly irritable, flippantly proud, that it’s simply incomprehensible what they’re hoping for and who will follow them.”
55
One can see here the burgeoning impulse in Dostoevsky to present an image of the “loftiest, divine beauty” in the face of the jeering, mocking unbelievers, whose names somewhat indiscriminately represent all shades of opinion and two generations of the godless Westernized intelligentsia.
This encounter between Turgenev and Dostoevsky soon became public knowledge, at least in literary circles, because the portions of Dostoevsky’s letter
concerning Turgenev were sent by Maikov to the editor of a journal called
Russian Archives
(
Russky Arkhiv
), who was requested to preserve the information “for posterity” but not allow its publication before 1890. Learning of this document through his informal literary factotum Annenkov, Turgenev promptly sent a disclaimer to the same editor through Annenkov, authorizing his intermediary to deny the views attributed to him. Referring to “the shocking and absurd opinions about Russia and the Russians that he attributes to me . . . which are supposed to constitute my convictions,” Turgenev denies that he ever would have expressed his “intimate convictions” before Dostoevsky. “I consider him,” he writes, “a person who, as a consequence of morbid seizures and other causes, is not in full control of his own rational capacities; and this opinion of mine is shared by many others.” During Dostoevsky’s visit, Turgenev urbanely explains, “he relieved his heart by brutal abuse against the Germans, against me and my last book, and then departed; I hardly had the time or desire to contradict him; I repeat that I treated him as somebody who was ill. Probably his disordered imagination produced those arguments that he attributed to me, and on whose basis he composed against me his . . . message to posterity.”
56
The editor responded reassuringly to Turgenev, noting as well that the document did not bear Dostoevsky’s name, and the matter ended there. Whether Dostoevsky’s “disordered imagination” did or did not invent the utterances ascribed to Turgenev can only remain an open question.
1
Anna Dostoevsky,
Reminiscences
, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 6, 79.
2
Ibid., 80.
3
Ibid., 86.
4
Ibid., 91.
5
Ibid., 90.
6
Ibid., 92.
7
Ibid., 97.
8
Ibid., 100.
9
Ibid., 109.
10
Ibid., 110.
11
Ibid., 112.
12
Ibid., 114.
13
Dnevnik A. G. Dostoevskoi, 1867 g
. (Moscow, 1923), 173, 33–35, 59. This work was translated into English, from a German rendering, as
The Diary of Dostoevsky’s Wife
, ed. Rene Fülöp-Miller and Dr. Fr. Eckstein, trans. Madge Pemberton (New York, 1928). I have used this translation as the basis for my own quotations from the original text.
14
Ibid., 35.
15
PSS
, 28/Bk. 2: 182.
16
Dnevnik A. G. Dostoevskoi
, 28.
17
Ibid., 48.
18
Ibid., 40.
19
PSS
, 28/Bk. 2: 204; August 16/28, 1867.
20
Ibid., 184–185; May 5/17, 1867.
21
Ibid., 186; May 6/18, 1867.
22
Ibid., 196–198; May 12/24, 1867.
23
Ibid., 192; May 9/21, 1867.
24
Dnevnik A. G. Dostoevskoi
, 116.
25
Reminiscences
, 127–128.
26
Dnevnik A. G. Dostoevskoi
, 185.
27
Ibid., 184.
28
Ibid., 311.
29
Ibid., 189, 186.
30
Ibid., 188.
31
Reminiscences
, 132.
32
Dnevnik A. G. Dostoevskoi
, 322.
33
Ibid., 223–224.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid., 269–270.
36
Ibid., 280.
37
Ibid., 322–323, 326.
38
Ibid., 339, 342.
39
Ibid., 345–346.
40
Ibid., 352.
41
PSSiP
, 9: 143.
42
PSS
28/Bk. 1: 244; November 9, 1856.
43
Dnevnik A. G. Dostoevskoi
, 185.
44
Ibid., 223.
45
PSSiP
, 5: 67.
46
Ibid., 628.
47
Ibid., 232–233.
48
PSS
28/Bk. 2: 450n.31.
49
“Pis’ma Maikova k Dostoevskomu,” in
DSiM
, 2: 338–339.
50
PSS
28/Bk. 2: 210; August 16/28, 1867.
51
Ibid., 211.
52
Ibid., 203–204.
53
Ibid.
54
Dnevnik A. G. Dostoevskoi
, 214.
55
PSS
28/Bk. 2: 211.
56
PSSiP
, 7: 17–18.
In Search of a Novel
The Dostoevskys arrived in Geneva on August 13/25, spending a day en route in Basel. In the short time afforded them, they hurried out to take in the sights, of which the Basel Museum alone merited Dostoevsky’s regard, or more precisely, two of the paintings displayed in the museum. Anna writes:
There are only two really priceless pictures in the whole Museum, one of them being the Dead Savior, a marvelous work that horrified me, and so deeply impressed Feodor that he pronounced Holbein the Younger a painter and creator of the first rank. . . . [T]he whole form [of Christ] is emaciated, the ribs and bones plain to see, hands and feet riddled with wounds, all blue and swollen, like a corpse on the point of decomposition. The face too is fearfully agonized, the eyes half open still, but with no expression in them, and giving no idea of
seeing
. Nose, mouth and chin are all blue; the whole thing bears such a strong resemblance to a real dead body. . . . Feodor, nonetheless, was completely carried away by it, and in his desire to look at it closer got on to a chair, so that I was in a terrible state lest he should have to pay a fine, like one is always liable to here.
1
This chance visit to the Basel Museum was to have momentous consequences for the creation of
The Idiot
, in which the canvas of Holbein the Younger plays an important symbolic role. No greater challenge could be offered to Dostoevsky’s own faith in Christ the God-man than such a vision of a tortured and decaying human being, whose face bore not a trace of the “extraordinary beauty” with which, as Dostoevsky was to write in the novel, Christ is usually painted. Instead, this picture expresses the subjection of the supernatural Christ to the physical order of nature, conceived “in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of that Being” (8: 339).
22. Hans Holbein the Younger,
Dead Christ
(1521–1522)
Holbein the Younger thus had created a work that relentlessly probed the basis of Christian belief with unflinching honesty, while presumably remaining loyal to its supernatural tenets. Dostoevsky’s excitement at encountering such a painting may be attributed to having discovered a fellow artist whose underlying inspiration was so close to his own. For Holbein the Younger—the friend of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, who left portraits of both these illustrious humanists—had been afflicted like them by the new currents of ideas flowing from the world of classical learning, and he had struggled to reconcile such secular influences, so contrary to the irrational dogmas of the Christian faith, with the renewal of such faith inspired by the iconoclastic fervors of the Reformation. In Holbein the Younger, Dostoevsky sensed an impulse, so similar to his own, to confront Christian faith with everything that negated it, and yet to surmount this confrontation with a rekindled (even if humanly tragic) affirmation.
