Dostoevsky (150 page)

Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg in mid-May to read proofs again and obtain another advance for his second trip to Ems, which produced many of the same negative reactions that had marked the first. As before, there are constant laments about the difficulty of working on the third part of
A Raw Youth
while taking the cure and in the upsetting conditions of Ems. “My darling Anya, I keep being horrified by the obligations that I’ve taken on myself. I see that, try as I might, there’ll be almost no time to write.”
³⁸

Echoes of his preparation for his scenarios can be found in his letters. “I’m reading about
Elijah
and
Enoch
(it’s superb) and Bessonov’s
Our Age
,” he tells Anna. He was probably seeking inspiration for the figure of Makar Dolgoruky, the Russian peasant wanderer (
strannik
), who makes his appearance in
Part III
and represents an idealized image of peasant religiosity (Bessonov’s book is a
collection of Russian historical folk poetry). He also enthuses over another text of the Old Testament, and his words not only give us a glimpse into childhood memories but also look forward to the creation of
The Brothers Karamazov
. “I am reading Job and it puts me into a state of painful ecstasy: I leave off reading and I walk about the room almost crying, and if it weren’t for the vile notes of the translator, I would perhaps be happy. That book, dear Anna, it’s strange, it was one of the first to impress me in my life. I was still practically an infant!”
³⁹

He read the Russian press, and he comments on some of the recent issues of
The Citizen
, for example, “Poretsky has gone completely off his head with Tolstoy.”
⁴⁰
Alexander Poretsky, an old friend, had furiously defended
Anna Karenina
against a criticism of the radical publicist Peter Tkachev, who had asked whether it was worth spending so much time talking about a book with such a foolish and even corrupting theme. Dostoevsky was then himself being man-handled in some journals, and he felt acutely the lack of any defender against those who were deprecating
him
. “Absolutely everyone in literature has turned against me. . . . I won’t go chasing after them,” he writes defiantly, referring to criticism in the
Journal de Pétersbourg
that “il n’y a rien de saillant” (nothing stands out) in the second part of
A Raw Youth
. But Dostoevsky refuses to be discouraged: “I won’t lose my energy for the future at all—you just be well, my helpmate, and we’ll manage one way or another.”
⁴¹

All but one of these letters from Ems are written to his wife. The single exception is addressed to Elena Pavlovna Ivanova, to whom Dostoevsky was distantly related by marriage and with whom he had once been close. During the summer of 1868, he had asked Elena, whose husband was in the last stages of a fatal illness, whether she would consider marrying him on becoming a widow. Now he inquires after the whereabouts of the elusive Pavel and expresses regret at the hostile rumors circulating about himself because of his claim to a share in the Kumanina estate—rumors that had become even more envenomed since the suit he had filed against collateral claimants. His favorite niece, Sofya Ivanova, had ceased to write to him for this reason.
⁴²

Dostoevsky left Ems after a little less than five weeks of treatment, having been told by his doctor “that my chest is in excellent condition, everything has healed. But the wheezing and difficulty in breathing are left; he said that may go away on its own.”
⁴³
On arriving in Petersburg, he was so short of money that he borrowed from friends; and he hastens to explain why to Anna. “On the way I met Pisemsky and Pavel Annenkov; they were traveling to Petersburg from
Baden-Baden (where Turgenev and Saltykov are). I couldn’t restrain myself and paid Annenkov (that is, to be passed on to Turgenev) fifty thalers. That’s what did me in. I couldn’t
possibly
have done anything else; it’s a matter of honor. Both Pisemsky and Annenkov treated me superbly.”
⁴⁴

¹
Anna Dostoevsky,
Reminiscences
, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 228.

²
PSS
, 29/Bk. 1: 319; May 5, 1874.

³
Ibid., 321; June 6, 1874.

⁴
See ibid., 531.

⁵
Ibid., 322; June 6, 1874.

⁶
Ibid., 323–324.

⁷
Ibid., 328.

⁸
Ibid., 331; June 16/28, 1874.

⁹
Ibid.

¹⁰
Ibid., 346; July 5/17, 1874.

¹¹
Ibid., 344.

¹²
Ibid., 333; June 16/24, 1874.

¹³
Ibid., 338; June 23/July 5, 1874.

¹⁴
Ibid., 360.

¹⁵
Ibid., 338.

¹⁶
Ibid., 354; July 14/26, 1874.

¹⁷
Ibid., 352, 353.

¹⁸
Reminiscences
, 233–234.

¹⁹
Ibid., 235.

²⁰
PSS
, 29/Bk. 1: 361; July 20/August 1, 1874.

²¹
Andrzej Walicki,
A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism
, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford, 1979), 224.

²²
PSS
, 17: 302.

²³
PSS
, 29/Bk. 1: 364; November 4, 1874.

²⁴
Ibid., 366–367; December 11, 1874.

²⁵
Ibid., 370–371; December 20, 1874.

²⁶
Ibid., 370; December 30, 1874.

²⁷
Ibid.

²⁸
Ibid., 2: 8; February 6, 1875. See also ibid., 194.

²⁹
Ibid., 9; February 4, 1875.

³⁰
Ibid., 11; February 1, 1875.

³¹
Ibid., 13; February 9, 1875.

³²
DVS
, 2: 214–215.

³³
LN
83 (Moscow, 1971), 619–620.

³⁴
Strakhov may well have taken revenge on Dostoevsky in the letter that he sent to Tolstoy in 1883, declaring that he wrote Dostoevsky’s biography only in a struggle against “my own rising revulsion, trying to suppress that ugly feeling in myself.” He reports having been told that Dostoevsky “had boasted of having . . . a little girl in the bathhouse, delivered over to him by her governess.” See
Reminiscences
, 371–382.

³⁵
Cited in
PSS
, 17: 346.

³⁶
PSS
, 29/Bk. 2: 10; February 7, 1875.

³⁷
Ibid., 20; February 14, 1875.

³⁸
Ibid., 36; June 4/16, 1875.

³⁹
Ibid., 43; June 10/22, 1875.

⁴⁰
Ibid., 49; June 15/27, 1875.

⁴¹
Ibid., 46–47; June 13/25, 1875.

⁴²
Ibid., 37–39; June 5/17, 1875.

⁴³
Ibid., 58; June 23/July 5, 1875.

⁴⁴
Ibid., 63; July 6, 1875.

The last chapters of
A Raw Youth
were published in
Notes of the Fatherland
in the winter of 1875. Written between
Demons
and
The Brothers Karamazov
, this curious hybrid of a novel is far from attaining the artistic stature of these two works, although its severest critics may have considerably exaggerated its defects. Why should
A Raw Youth
slump so markedly when compared with Dostoevsky’s other major novels? Some answers may be located in the implicit self-censorship that he here exercised on his creative faculties.

Several extended notes show that Dostoevsky had a plan for a novel about three brothers, and that he was tempted by the possibility of writing what could have become
The Brothers Karamazov
. One note contains an outline that would require only a little reshuffling to fit the later work: “one brother is an atheist. Despair. The other is a thoroughgoing fanatic. The third represents the new generation, a living force, new people . . . and the children, as the youngest generation” (16: 16). Ivan Karamazov’s outraged rejection of his ticket of admission to a world of eternal harmony based on injustice and suffering is foreshadowed in the defiance of the older brother: “If the way of the world is that something disgusting always has to turn up in place of something pure, then let it all come crashing down: ‘I refuse to accept such a world.’ ” This declaration is followed by the authorial comment: “His whole misfortune lies in the fact that He is an atheist and does not believe in resurrection”—which will be the case with Ivan as well (16: 15).

Similarly, the issue of Ivan’s “Euclidean understanding,” his refusal to accept the mysteries of faith, also appears in this context. “Existence must be unquestionably and in every instance superior to the mind of man. The doctrine that the mind of man is the final limit of the universe is as stupid as stupid can be, and even stupider, infinitely stupider, than a game of checkers between two shopkeepers.” The relation of Versilov, a main figure in the novel, to others, and his interpretation of the love ethic of Christ, also anticipates Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor. “It is impossible to love people the way they are,” he declares. “And yet one must love them, for this is what we are ordered to do (by Christ).” But “people are base, they like to love and to adore from fear,” and so he believes that “without any doubt, Christ could not have loved them; he suffered them,
he forgave them, but of course he also despised them. . . . Love for mankind must be understood as love for a perfected mankind, one that exists so far only as an ideal, and God only knows if it will ever become reality” (16: 156–157).

These notes also contain a jotting that supplies a first version of the plot line of
The Brothers Karamazov
: “In Tobolsk, about twenty years ago, like the Ilyinsky story” (17: 5–6). Ilyinsky, it will be recalled, had been a fellow prisoner with Dostoevsky in Siberia, convicted of the murder of his father solely on circumstantial evidence. This extended note, along with the recollection of Ilyinsky, is obviously the nucleus of
The Brothers Karamazov
(an innocent older brother sent to Siberia for a crime committed by a younger one, finally unable to endure his guilt), and indicates how close Dostoevsky came to embarking on such a novel at this point.

He was aware of this possibility and wrote about it in his
Diary of a Writer
(January 1876). “When Nikolay Alekseyevich Nekrasov asked me to write a novel for
Notes of the Fatherland
,” he explained, “I almost began my
Fathers and Children
, but I held back, and thank God I did, for I was not ready. In the meantime, I wrote only
A Raw Youth
, this first attempt at my idea.” Why Dostoevsky decided to confine himself to this “first attempt” is understandable. He was, after all, toiling over a book to be published in
Notes of the Fatherland
, the journal in which the influential Mikhailovsky had objected to his preference for sensational subject matter (such as murder). In addition, Dostoevsky’s articles in
The Citizen
for 1873 had shown his preoccupation with the problem of the younger generation and its search for moral values. From where could these young idealists acquire those values when their fathers had become so morally bankrupt themselves? Such reasons could well have persuaded him to reserve his murder motif for a less problematic venue and to focus instead on the nonlethal but no less pernicious sins of the fathers in failing to impart any life-enhancing moral values to their sons. He therefore reduced the theme of parricide to that of parental irresponsibility and substituted a relatively innocent and boyishly illusory romantic rivalry between father and son for the merciless Oedipal clash in
The Brothers Karamazov
that so impressed Freud. He decided to write a social-psychological novel of a relatively limited range rather than to dramatize the collision of conflicting moral-spiritual absolutes that invariably inspired his best work.

If some of the defects of
A Raw Youth
may be ascribed to the decision to write for a Populist journal, the place of publication also gives a special interest to many details of the text. For
A Raw Youth
is Dostoevsky’s first artistic response to the challenges posed by the new phase of Russian culture inaugurated by the ideology of Russian Populism. Indeed, while narrating the peripeties by which his youthful hero Arkady comes to manhood, he interweaves them with what he felt to be the glaring anomaly at the heart of Populist values—their recognition of the Christian moral ideals of the peasant world they idolized, and yet their
refusal to accept the very foundation of this world in the divinity of Christ.
A Raw Youth
, if read in this perspective, thus becomes a kind of Trojan horse introduced into the very journalistic citadel of the former enemy to undermine its last defenses.