Dostoevsky (153 page)

These final pages contain a lengthy confession speech by Versilov that is the high point of the novel. The death of Makar temporarily transfigures Versilov’s personality, and in a sudden surge of genuine sincerity he finally divulges to Arkady the “idea” that has given inspiration to his life. To express this “idea,” which is actually a “vision,” Dostoevsky reaches back into his unpublished files and utilizes the myth of the Golden Age initially intended for the unpublished chapters
of Stavrogin’s confession. Versilov’s version, however, is not moral-psychological but historical-philosophical; it illustrates Dostoevsky’s own ideas about the future of European civilization and its relation to Russia. Moreover, in the ideological structure of
A Raw Youth
, Versilov’s fantasy parallels that of Makar and is intended to supplement it, thus disclosing the essential unity of the Russian spirit. For Versilov projects in terms of European history what Makar expresses in terms of Russian apocalyptic religiosity.

His dream evokes “a corner of the Greek archipelago . . . blue smiling waves, isles and rocks. . . . Here was the earthly paradise of man.” The innocent beauty of this vision, “when the gods came down from the skies and were of one kin with men,” filled his heart with “the love of all humanity”; this was “the first day of European civilization”—a civilization whose finest flower was precisely “the love of all humanity” that brings tears of all-embracing tenderness to Versilov’s eyes. “Oh, here lived a splendid race! They rose up to sleep and lay down to sleep happy and innocent. . . . Their wealth of untouched strength was spent on simple-hearted joy and love.” But when sleep ends, he is jolted back into the hurly-burly of history: “The first day of European civilization which I had seen in my dream was transformed for me at once on awakening into the setting sun of the last day of civilization! One seemed to hear the death knell ringing over Europe in those days” (13: 375).

What sounded this death knell was the recent Franco-Prussian War, the temporary establishment of the Paris Commune, and the burning of the Tuileries that ensued in the struggle for control of the city. In the midst of general chaos, it was only he, as “a Russian European,” who could not reconcile himself to this final collapse. Yet in a passage daring for its time, when even liberal Russian opinion regarded the destruction of the Tuileries as an abomination, Dostoevsky did not hesitate to give it a partial justification as an understandable consequence of the flagrant injustices of European society. “I alone among all the conservative reactionaries,” Versilov declares, “could have told those bent on revenge that what happened at the Tuileries, though a crime, was still logical” (13: 375–376).

In compelling but ultimately sterile contrast to Makar, who had been a wanderer in Russia as a religious pilgrim, Versilov recalls having been “a solitary wanderer” in Europe. Like Makar, Versilov too was preaching the fulfillment of the reign of love and the advent of the Kingdom of God. “Among us [Russian noblemen],” he declares, “has been created by the ages a type of the highest culture, never seen before and existing nowhere else in the world—a type of worldwide compassion for all” (13: 376–377). This Russian nobleman is a prototype of “the man of the future,” and his role is precisely to transcend destructive national differences. The Russian European thus fulfills the injunctions of Christian love on the level of history; the law of his being is to be most himself in total abnegation to others. The Russian peasant-pilgrim Makar and the Russian European
Versilov, each inspired by his own form of the Christian promise, are thus united in their service to this vision of a new Christian Golden Age.

What continues to separate the two, however, will be captured in Versilov’s remarkable evocation of an atheistic world deprived of belief in a divine Christ—a world that is the final outcome of the inexorable European process of self-destruction. “The great idea of immortality would have vanished, and they would have to fill its place, and all the wealth of love lavished of old upon Him who was immortal would be turned upon the whole of nature, on the world, on man. . . . Men left forlorn would begin to draw together more closely and more lovingly” (13: 378–379). He thus intuits that the profane Golden Age he envisages, a world without immortality, would be pervaded by an aching sense of sadness and sorrow. This accent placed on the “sorrow” of a world without God—even a world that realizes, on its own terms, the Christian ideal of mutual love—is Dostoevsky’s artistic answer to the sublimest secular ideals of Socialism.

Versilov finally breaks off his speech, acknowledging that “the whole thing is a fantasy, even one that is quite unbelievable,” but “I couldn’t have lived my whole life without it.” He defines himself as a “deist, a philosophical deist,” not an atheist, which is perhaps meant to suggest an unsatisfied religious longing that remains an abstraction rather than a vitally active personal relationship with the sacred. But Versilov cannot entirely suppress his need for a faith closer to that of Makar. “The remarkable thing,” he confides, “is that I . . . could not fail to imagine Him in the last resort among the orphaned people. He would come to them and stretch out his arms to them and . . . there and then the scales would fall from their eyes and there would burst forth a great exalted hymn to the new and total resurrection” (13: 379).

This brilliant and moving portrayal of the Golden Age as a Feuerbachian world, in which mankind, rather than alienating all its love from the earthly to the supernatural, would lavish it on themselves, is one of Dostoevsky’s great passages. It equals, in expressive poignancy, Raskolnikov’s dream of the plague in
Crime and Punishment
, and it would be hard to find its match elsewhere. What follows is almost embarrassing, as the machinery of the plot is dutifully cranked up to display the vacillations of Versilov on the level of the intrigue.

The details of the intrigue need not concern us, except to note that the morally healing impact of Makar’s death proves to be short-lived, and all the most acute symptoms of the “Russian fate” now assail Versilov. Literally, he becomes two people: one is contrite and remorseful over his eccentric and outrageous behavior, while the other continues to perform the most disgraceful actions under the uncontrollable influence of “a second self.” “Do you know that I feel as though I were split in two,” Versilov says. “Yes, I am really split in two mentally, and I’m horribly afraid of it.” Just after uttering these words, moved by the irresistible destructive force of his “second self,” he smashes the icon left him as a
heritage and pledge for the future by Makar; and though he shouts, “don’t take this as being allegorical, Sonya,” he admits the significance a moment later: “All right, so take it as an allegory, that’s how it was meant!” (13: 408–409). The Russian European “wanderer” from the intelligentsia, whatever the elevation of his spirit, is ultimately unable to take up the burden of the Cross—the “allegory” of his reunion with the Russian people. On the more prosaic level of the plot, Versilov never marries Arkady’s mother, even though he is now legally free to do so.

Arkady’s speculations about Versilov’s demented behavior form part of the epilogue, but it was hardly to be expected that the still callow young man should give any sophisticated analysis of his father’s psychological contortions. Arkady cannot draw any definite conclusions, and in refusing to go beyond the immaturity of his narrator Dostoevsky took the considerable risk of turning Versilov too obviously into a pathological case, thus furnishing fuel to the critics who had always charged him with an unhealthy concern for psychic abnormality. Elsewhere, psychic disorder is always presented as the result of a profound moral-spiritual crisis, and the attempt to “explain” it in purely psychiatric terms is satirized and ridiculed.

Versilov, the former man of the world, is now a helpless semi-invalid, entirely dependent on Sofya and Tatyana Pavlovna. “His intelligence and his moral standards have remain unchanged,” remarks Arkady, “while his striving for an ideal has become even stronger.” Nonetheless, the old, capricious Versilov emerges in a scaled-down replay of the superb deathbed scene of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. Versilov first expressed a desire to observe the Lenten fast of the Orthodox Church, but then, two days later, because “something had irritated him unexpectedly, something he described laughingly as ‘an amusing incongruity,’ ” he abandons his intention. “ ‘I do love God very much, my friends,’ he said, ‘but I simply have no talent for these things’ ”; no conversion of “the philosophical deist” to the rites of Orthodoxy takes place (13: 446–447).

Allusions to numerous writers, both Russian and European, appeared in Dostoevsky’s notes for
A Raw Youth
, particularly to Pushkin and Dickens, but most frequently mentioned is Tolstoy, and these references are central to his artistic aim of going beyond what the gentry writers had accomplished. As he had written to Strakhov three years earlier, both Turgenev and Tolstoy had created only “gentry-landowner literature. It has said everything that it had to say (superbly by Lev Tolstoy) . . . but there has not yet been a
new word
to replace that of the gentry-landowners.”
²
His desire to pick up the artistic gauntlet had certainly been strengthened recently by the acclaim accorded to
Anna Karenina
.

If he had not intended to enter into a more overt rivalry with Tolstoy, he was certainly goaded into doing so while defending himself against the hostile attacks provoked by the publication of his first chapters. One critic accused him of excessive “naturalism”—a naturalism so extreme that it violated the rules of art, as if Dostoevsky wished his readers to feel that they were literally participating in the events being depicted, no matter how menacing or threatening. Two venomous articles in the
Russian Messenger
, where his own earlier novels had been published, accused him of being “immoral” and of fixing “the reader in the stinking atmosphere of the underground, [which] . . . blunts his sense of smell and accustoms him to this stinking underground.”
³

His first impulse, which he confided to his notebooks on March 22, 1875, was to answer such denigrations in a preface to be included with the novel’s later publication in book form, and the notes for this preface contain the most illuminating self-definitions that he ever gave of his own artistic mission. As he saw it, his aim was to depict the moral-spiritual consequences of living in a society that “had no foundations,” and which in fact “hasn’t worked out any rules of life, because there really hasn’t been any life either.” This society has experienced “a colossal shock—and everything comes to a halt, falls down, and is negated as if it hadn’t ever existed. And not just externally, as in the West, but internally, morally.” Meanwhile, “our most talented writers [he mentions Tolstoy and Goncharov] have been describing the life of the upper middle class,” believing they were “describing the life of the majority.” But this was an illusion: the life they portray is that “of exceptions, while mine is the life of the general rule” (16: 329).

Dostoevsky speaks of “the civic feeling” that for a moment had led him to think of joining the Slavophils “with the idea of resurrecting the dreams of my childhood” (which included his reverence for Saints Sergius and Tikhon). Instead, he created the underground man, for whom he is now being insulted. “I am proud,” he defiantly proclaims, “to have exposed, for the first time, the real image of the Russian majority . . . its misshapen and tragic aspects. The tragic lies in one’s awareness of being misshapen.” Listing characters created by other writers (including Prince Bolkonsky of
War and Peace
and Levin in
Anna Karenina
), he sees their defects as arising solely from “petty self-love,” which can be adjusted according to the fixed social norms of their still unshaken moral-social order. Only
he
had brought out “the tragedy of the underground, which consists of suffering, self-laceration, an awareness of a better life coupled with the impossibility of attaining it. . . . What can sustain those who do try to improve themselves? A reward, faith? Nobody is offering any reward, and in whom could one have faith? Another step from this position, and you have extreme depravity, crime (murder). A mystery” (16: 329).