Dostoevsky (147 page)
Authors: Joseph Frank
The activity of the Populists in the early 1870s could well have seemed to Dostoevsky a more than coincidental response to everything he had been advocating in his books. A classic description of their aims and ideals in the spring of 1874 can be found again in the memoirs of Prince Kropotkin. The primary concern of all, he writes, was to find the answer to one important question:
In what way could they be useful to the masses? Gradually, they came to the idea that the only way was to settle among the people, and to live the people’s life. Young men came to the villages as doctors, doctor’s helpers,
village scribes, even as agricultural laborers, blacksmiths, woodcutters. . . . Girls passed teacher’s examinations, learned midwifery or nursing, and went by the hundreds to the villages, devoting themselves to the poorest part of the population. These people went without any idea of social reconstruction in mind, or any thought of revolution. They simply wanted to teach the mass of the peasants to read, to instruct them in other things, to give them medical help, and in this way to aid in raising them from their darkness and misery, and to learn at the same time what were
their
popular ideals of a better social life.
15
This picture is a little too idyllic, although it can be accepted as a firsthand account of the deeply altruistic mood in which the young Populists went to the people. Their aim was also to “raise the consciousness” of the people and to prepare the way for revolution. Some groups, influenced by Bakunin, were convinced that only a spark was necessary to ignite a raging fire of revolt among the descendants of Pugachev and Stenka Razin, and they were disappointed to find the Russian folk so distressingly immune to their incendiary rhetoric. The peasants on the whole would have little truck with these educated youth, who mysteriously appeared in their midst awkwardly garbed in peasant clothes, and they loyally reported them to the police. Dostoevsky had prophesied just such a reaction in the concluding pages of
Demons
, when his pathetic innocent, Stepan Verkhovensky, decided to “go to the people” about whom he had been prating all his life.
All of literate Russia was emotionally stirred by this moral crusade, which suddenly, and apparently spontaneously, moved thousands of the finest youth to “give up their riches” (many came from wealthy and highly placed families) and “go to the people.” The minister of justice, Count Pahlen, noted in surprise that many respectable families helped their own children embark on this irresistible outpouring of effort to realize the Christian ideal of love, the ideal of aiding and comforting those who suffer. S. M. Kravchinsky, a participant who was scarcely a sentimentalist (a few years later he would stab to death in broad daylight the head of the Russian secret police), spoke of the movement as hardly anything “that could be called political. It was rather some sort of crusading procession, distinguished by the totally infectious and all-embracing character of a religious movement. People sought not only the attainment of a definite practical goal, but at the same time the satisfaction of a deep need for personal moral purification.”
16
Dostoevsky could well have discerned in what he heard of these events—and all of Russian society was abuzz with rumors about them—the beginning of a realization of his own social-political ideal. For the Populist youth were not only
concerned to educate and arouse the people, they also wished to be educated themselves, to assimilate to them, learn about their values and beliefs. Dostoevsky had always dreamed of such a fusion between the intelligentsia and the people, and he could well have believed, during the mad spring and summer of 1874, that the longed-for day had finally dawned. But if so, a major article of Mikhailovsky’s on
Demons
in
Notes of the Fatherland
revealed the gulf between the radicals and himself that would never be bridged.
Taking pains to treat Dostoevsky with respect as “one of the most talented of our contemporary writers,” Mikhailovsky focuses his critique on Dostoevsky’s depiction of Russian radicalism as the end product of the disintegrating European influence on Russian culture. As Dostoevsky saw it, the Russian educated classes had become detached from the Russian people and simultaneously from the people’s religion, and had thus lost the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. Hence they were inevitably doomed to the destruction depicted in
Demons
. Mikhailovsky objects, however, that it is not necessary to share the religious convictions of the people in order to accept the moral values embodied in their way of life. Dostoevsky, he points out, uses the word “God” in
Demons
sometimes to mean a supreme being and sometimes as a synonym for “national particularities” and national customs, thus identifying attachment to the Russian people with religious faith. But this theory is “simply impossible,” and Mikhailovsky carefully disengages the question of religion from that of the relation between the intelligentsia and the people.
17
For the novelist, there is only the unequivocal condemnation of the intelligentsia pronounced in
Demons
or the equally unequivocal and uncritical glorification of the people in his journalistic pieces. Dostoevsky is “a happy man,” Mikhailovsky writes enviously. “He knows that whatever happens with the people, in the end it will save itself and us.”
18
All those who do not share this faith in the people, with all their customs and beliefs, are called
citoyens
by Dostoevsky, the French appellation stressing their alienation from their native soil. But whatever the past, Mikhailovsky goes on, it is a mistake to overlook the new group of
citoyens
(the Populists), who, while sharing his reverence for “the Russian people’s truth,” nonetheless find the traditions of this “truth” contradictory and confusing; they accept only that part which coincides with the general principles of “humanity” acquired from other sources (the ideals of social justice embodied in Western Socialism). Indeed, as Mikhailovsky penetratingly remarks, Dostoevsky does the very same thing himself in many instances, though refusing to acknowledge that he arbitrarily identifies his own humane values with “the Russian people’s truth.”
In a passage that became famous and echoes Lavrov, Mikhailovsky writes that these
citoyens
are willing to forgo agitating for legal and political rights, which would benefit only themselves as members of the educated class, and work for social reforms of immediate benefit to the people. “Giving the preference to social reforms over political ones,” Mikhailovsky explains, “we are only renouncing the strengthening of our rights and the development of our freedom as instruments for the oppression of the people and even further sin.”
19
Admonishing Dostoevsky directly, he writes: “If you would stop playing with the word ‘God’ and become acquainted somewhat more closely with your shameful Socialism, you would be convinced that it coincides with at least some of the elements of the Russian people’s truth.” Rather than attack those who now share a common reverence for the people and their “truth,” he urges Dostoevsky to look around and pay attention to all the new “devils” that have recently emerged to plague the country:
Russia, that frenzied invalid you have depicted, is being girded with railroads, besprinkled with factories and banks—and in your novel there is not a single indication of this world! You focus your attention on an insignificant handful of madmen and scoundrels! There is no devil of national wealth [industrial expansion at the expense of the welfare of the people] in your novel, the most widespread devil of all and less than all the others knowing the boundaries of good and evil.
20
Acknowledging the impact of Mikhailovsky’s article in the very next issue of
The Citizen
, Dostoevsky called it “a new revelation for me” (21: 156). Dostoevsky was touched by the gravity of Mikhailovsky’s tone, with its deeply felt expression of the Populists’ desire to sacrifice themselves on behalf of the people. But he had no illusions concerning the major point on which he and the Populists would continue to differ, and he put his finger on the crucial bone of contention between them, no matter how much their views might otherwise coincide. “But to write and assert that Socialism is not atheistic,” he admonished Mikhailovsky, “and that atheism is not its central, fundamental essence—that surprises me extremely” (21: 157).
Just about this time (1873) the antagonism between radicalism and religious faith had been resoundingly proclaimed by a resolution of the Slavic section of the First International. Under the influence of Bakunin, it had declared itself in favor of “atheism and materialism” and had pledged “to fight against any kind of divine worship, against all official religious confessions and . . . to endeavor to eradicate the idea of divinity in all its manifestations.”
21
“Socialism—this is also
Christianity,” Dostoevsky had jotted down in his notebooks (1872–1875), “but it proposes that it can succeed with reason.”
22
Such words indicate his awareness of the Christian inspiration underlying Populist Socialism, but pinpoint what he felt to be its self-contradiction.
In one of the most arresting of Dostoevsky’s articles, “One of Today’s Falsehoods” (in which he aimed to free himself from the cloud hanging over his name as regards
Demons
), Dostoevsky focused on the atheism stemming from David Strauss for the purposes of his covert argument with the Populists. “People will tell me, perhaps . . . that, for example, even if Strauss does hate Christ and has set himself as his life’s goal the mocking of Christianity, he nevertheless worships humanity as a whole and his teaching is as elevated and noble as can be.” He is willing to admit that “the goals of all today’s leaders of progressive European thought are philanthropic and magnificent.” But he is also convinced of something else, which he expresses in a powerful peroration that now seems remarkably clairvoyant: “If you were to give all these grand, contemporary teachers full scope to destroy the old society and build it anew, the result would be such obscurity, such chaos, something so crude, blind, and inhuman that the whole structure would collapse to the sound of humanity’s curses before it could even be completed. Once having rejected Christ, the human heart can go to amazing lengths. That’s an axiom” (21: 132–133). Dostoevsky was thus arguing that even those who regarded Socialism as an updating of Christian ideals—as the Populists had begun to do again—were not immune from the temptations of Nechaevism, even though they had rejected the Utilitarianism basis of his tactics.
Nonetheless, because the Russian Populists no longer linked atheism to a rejection of Christian morality or the teachings of Christ
as such
, there will be a noticeable shift of accent in Dostoevsky’s relation to this new brand of radicalism. He will treat it with a mildness of tone in sharp contrast with his polemics of the 1860s, and his artistic notice will no longer be on figures like the underground man (who denies the possibility of
any
kind of morality, on Nihilist principles) or like Raskolnikov and Stavrogin, who replace Christian conscience with a Utilitarian calculus or with a proto-Nietzschean theory of amoral indifferentism beyond good and evil. The Populists had now come around to accepting the Christian values of “the Russian people’s truth,” and so he believed he could appeal to them in terms of a morality they would not automatically reject.
Dostoevsky had always insisted that the Russian knows in his heart of hearts that he has sinned; the European, on the other hand, complacently accepts malfeasance as perfectly justified. In this context, Dostoevsky famously asserted: “I
think that the principal and most basic spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering, incessant and unslakeable suffering, everywhere and in everything. I think the Russian people have been infused with this need from time immemorial. . . . There is always an element of suffering even in the happiness of the Russian people, and without it their happiness is incomplete” (21: 36). The Russian people’s imputed “love of suffering” meant a desire for moral and spiritual redemption, which in the end would gain the upper hand over the evils of the present time.
His great ambition had always been to reconcile the refractory and radicalized younger generation, if not to the existing conditions of Russian life, then to the government that, as he was convinced, offered the only possibility of changing such conditions for the better. This new basis for dialogue thus offered him an unrivaled opportunity, which he sought to utilize by publishing his next work in Mikhailovsky’s own journal,
Notes of the Fatherland
. The weakest link in the Populists’ ideology was their willingness to revere “the Russian people’s truth” while refusing to accept the root of this “truth” in the people’s inherited belief in Christ as the divine God-man. How could the Populists idolize the people without also adhering to the religious faith from which all the people’s moral values sprang and which for Dostoevsky provided their only firm anchorage? The theme of the necessity for religious faith takes on a new importance and intensity in the novels of this last period and is conspicuously placed in the foreground. To be sure, it had always been present, but subordinated to a defense of the Christian ethics of love and self-sacrifice against Nihilist onslaughts.