Dostoevsky (159 page)

The Russian Army advanced rapidly in the early days of the campaign but was delayed for four months during the siege of the Bulgarian city of Plevna, where it sustained heavy losses. As Russian losses mounted, Dostoevsky does everything in his power to keep up the spirits of his countrymen, insisting that “the Russian people . . . all, as one man, want to achieve the great aim of the war for Christianity” (26: 44). Once Plevna had been captured, the Russian Army resumed its advance and was soon within sight of Constantinople. But when the Turks sued for peace, the war-weary Alexander II accepted. The initial treaty of San Stefano awarded the Russians a considerable amount of territory and influence in southeast Europe—so much that the united European powers demanded (and obtained) a revision of the treaty that deprived Russia of much of the fruits of victory. The war thus ended for Russia in a general sense of disappointment and frustration. The new era of world history that Dostoevsky had prophesied turned out to be a mirage.

The sketches and short stories in the
Diary of a Writer
contain some of the purest and most moving expressions of Dostoevsky’s genius, happily free from the dubious elements of his ideology so often marring his articles. Even those critics and readers who sharply disagreed with his vehemently asserted opinions were unanimously warm in their praise of such masterpieces as “A Gentle Creature” (
Krotkaya
) and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (
Son smeshnogo cheloveka
). Shortly after the publication of the first of these stories, Saltykov-Shchedrin invited Dostoevsky to contribute a story to
Notes of the Fatherland
. As he wrote to a friend, “You simply feel like crying as you read; there are very few such jewels in all of European literature.”
⁴
These stories indeed contain the essence of the most sympathetic aspects of Dostoevsky’s vision—his acute identification with human suffering, both material and spiritual, and his unswerving commitment
to an ideal of human felicity attained through fulfilling the Christian commandment of mutual love.

The very first issue of the
Diary
contains an extremely touching sketch—“A Little Boy at Christ’s Christmas Party” (
Malchik u Christa na Elke
)—that could not illustrate more clearly the organic relation between his journalism and his art. Just a month before, on December 26, 1875, Dostoevsky had taken his daughter to the annual Christmas ball for children at the Artists’ Club in Petersburg, an event famous for the size of the Christmas tree in the ballroom and for the lavishness of its decorations. The next day he paid his visit, already described, to the colony for juvenile delinquents. While going to and fro in the Petersburg streets, and pondering over what to include in his first fascicule, he noticed a little boy begging for alms. These impressions, he wrote Vsevolod Solovyev, solved his problem; he decided to devote a good part of the January issue “to children—children in general, children with fathers, children without fathers . . . under Christmas trees, without Christmas trees, criminal children.”
⁵
And so he begins with the Christmas ball and ends with the visit to the colony for delinquents; between them he inserts his fictional sketch.

The first mention of the sketch in his notebooks, dated December 30, reads: “The Christmas tree. The small boy in Rückert” (22: 322). Friedrich Rückert, a minor German poet, had composed the prose poem,
The Orphaned Child’s Christmas
(
Des fremden Kindes Heiliger Christ
). Dostoevsky had lived in Germany, where its recital was a standard feature of Christmas festivities (much like Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
in English-speaking lands). The thematic similarity of Dostoevsky’s story and the poem was first pointed out by G. M. Fridlender.
⁶
An orphaned child wanders the streets at Christmas, peering into the brightly lit windows of houses where happy children have Christmas trees. He knocks on the doors and windows of the houses, hoping that someone will take pity on his lonely misery; but all remains silent. Overcome with grief, he breaks into tears and calls on Christ to rescue him from his desolation; suddenly another child appears, carrying a torch and dressed in white. It is the Christ-child himself, who points to a huge Christmas tree shining among the stars more brightly than any in the houses. It has been lit for all the orphans of the world, and, as if in a dream, angels descend from the glittering tree. The orphan is carried up to the light, and in heavenly eternity he forgets all the travails of his life on earth.

Rückert’s poem touchingly dissolves the miseries of the poor orphan into an eternity of heavenly bliss. Dostoevsky, as one might expect, gives the same theme a more somber treatment and penetrates far more deeply into the wretchedness of his little beggar-boy. The very placement of the sketch in the
Diary
brings out
the pathos of his loneliness by contrast; and because it is set between descriptions of events that actually occurred, a semblance of verisimilitude is imparted to the miraculous intervention of the Christ-child. Indeed, Dostoevsky plays effectively on the ambiguous status of the sketch as “art” and “invention,” but an invention resembling “reality” so closely that it is difficult to tell the difference. “I know for certain,” the sketch begins, “that I actually did invent it; yet I keep fancying that this happened somewhere, sometime, precisely on Christmas Eve, in
a certain
huge city during a terrible frost” (22: 14).

The general absence of specificity in the background detail extends the anecdote into a sort of parable. We find ourselves in an archetypal Dostoevskian milieu, characteristic of almost every work—a dark, freezing, miserable Petersburg hovel, a dying woman lying neglected and alone on a bare bed, a hungry, shivering little boy dressed in rags, uncomprehendingly watching her death agony. “How did she happen to be here?—She may have come with her little boy from some faraway town, and then suddenly had fallen ill.” Everything is left in this atmosphere of vagueness, and the situation thus takes on the universal quality of a mythical exemplar. This is not an individual woman dying but one whose fate symbolizes that of thousands. By contrast, as the little boy shiveringly and futilely looks around the room for something to eat, there is a keen acuity of sensuous detail that throws the awfulness of the situation into high relief. “For a moment he stood still, resting his hand on the shoulder of the dead woman. Then he began to breathe on his tiny fingers in an attempt to warm them, and, suddenly, coming upon his little cap that lay on the bedstead, he groped along cautiously and quietly made his way out of the basement” (22: 14–15).

The remainder of the tale records the little boy’s reactions as he wanders through the streets of the looming city at night, gazing into houses filled with happy children clustering around sumptuous Christmas trees, and pauses with fascination before mechanical toys in a shop window. Frightened by some older, unruly urchins, he takes refuge in a yard behind a pile of wood (a familiar Dostoevskian setting). There he falls asleep, and his frozen body is found the next morning. But before his pitiful demise, he has dreamed a wonderful dream: “Where is he now? Everything sparkles and glitters and shines, and scattered all over are tiny dolls—no, they are little boys and girls, only they are so luminous, and they all fly around him.” These are the children at the party of Christ’s Christmas tree, a party for all the child-victims of human sin and social injustice. Some of these children

In the concluding paragraph, Dostoevsky shifts back to himself as narrator and to the “imaginary” aspects of his narrative. “But the point is that I keep fancying that all this could actually have happened—I mean, the things which happened in the basement and behind the piles of kindling wood. Well, and as regards Christ’s Christmas Tree—I really don’t know what to tell you, and I don’t know whether or not this could have happened” (22: 17). Whether or not any of these events could or did happen, the aim of this sketch is manifestly to make something approximating Christ’s Christmas party happen on earth.

In the early pages of the February issue, Dostoevsky exalted the Russian people, arguing that everything of value in Russian literature originates in the assimilation by Russian writers of the people’s Christian ideals. Expressing a certain weariness, however, with all these “
professions de foi
,” he decides to relate a reminiscence that, “for some reason, I am quite eager to recount precisely here and now, in conclusion of our treatise on the people” (22: 46). This reminiscence is “The Peasant Marey,” and its significance far transcends its immediate purpose in the
Diary
. On one level, the episode is a supplement—and an extremely valuable one—to
House of the Dead
; on another, it is the only direct evocation of his childhood coming from his pen. This entry of the
Diary
has been discussed earlier (on pp. 207–211) in the chapter on
House of the Dead
, and is unquestionably of crucial importance, not only because of the unique childhood reminiscence but also as the only attempt by Dostoevsky to portray the inner evolution of his beliefs about the Russian peasants. Its details are worth repeating here more briefly in the context in which it was originally written.

The episode begins with a sharp and swift evocation of the Easter week celebration in the Siberian stockade, during which the prisoners could drink, carouse, and quarrel to their heart’s content. Dostoevsky looked on, with a feeling of deep loathing, at the raucous turbulence and brutality of the spectacle unrolling before his eyes. “Never,” he confesses, “could I stand without disgust drunken popular rakishness, and particularly in this place.” Another political criminal, a cultivated Polish patriot, expressed what seemed to be their common reaction when the two met outside the barracks, where they had gone to escape the
brawling and the bedlam. “He looked at me gloomily, his eyes flashing; his lips began to tremble: ‘
Je hais ces brigands!
’—he told me in a low voice, grinding his teeth, and passed by” (22: 46).

Returning to the barracks, Dostoevsky then lies down on the wooden boards where all the convicts slept and begins—as he did for consolation—to conjure up his past memory. And he suddenly recalls how once, at the age of nine, he had been happily exploring the forest on his father’s property during a summer vacation. The one or two sentences devoted to the forest are full of feeling, evincing a sensibility rarely displayed elsewhere: “And in all my life nothing have I loved so much as the forest, with its mushrooms and wild berries, its insects and birds and little hedgehogs and squirrels; its damp odor of dead leaves, which I so adored” (22: 47). He had been warned by his mother that wolves were in the vicinity, and suddenly, in the midst of his bucolic foraging, he heard distinctly (though it turned out to be an auditory hallucination) the cry that a wolf had been spotted. Terrified, the boy ran to a peasant plowing in a nearby field.

“This was our peasant Marey. . . . He was almost fifty years old, stocky, pretty tall, with much gray hair in his bushy, flaxen beard.” The peasant comforts the little boy, and blesses him. “He extended his hand and stroked me on the cheek. ‘Do stop fearing! Christ be with thee. Cross thyself’ ” (22: 48). The consoling words calmed the agitated young Dostoevsky and convinced him that there had been no wolf. The incident had vanished from his memory for twenty years, but lay dormant there, like a seed planted in the soil, ready to blossom and flower at the moment when its reappearance would take on the stature of a revelation. Here, in his childhood experience, in one symbolic and never-to-be-forgotten instant, Dostoevsky had glimpsed all the spiritual beauty contained in the Russian peasant character. “He was our peasant serf, while I was his master’s little boy; no one would learn of his kindness to me and no one would reward him . . . only God, maybe, perceived from above what a profound and enlightened human sentiment, what delicate, almost womanly tenderness may fill the heart of some coarse, bestially ignorant Russian peasant serf, who, in those days, had no intimations about his freedom” (22: 49).

The resurrection of this long-faded childhood incident brought about a complete transformation in Dostoevsky’s whole relation to his previously abhorrent surroundings. No longer does he see the drunken convicts as coarse brutes, incapable of harboring any humane and generous feelings; they now have all become potential Mareys, whose natural purity of soul had been over-laid by the harshness and hopeless oppression of their lives. “I went along, gazing attentively at the faces which I encountered. This intoxicated, shaven and branded peasant, with marks on his face, bawling his hoarse, drunken song—why, he may be the very same Marey; for I have no way of peering into his heart” (22: 50). This incident furnishes a valuable paradigm for grasping how
Dostoevsky persuaded himself of the validity of his own beliefs about the Russian people. And it illustrates once more his genius for taking an isolated and commonplace personal incident and endowing it with a wide-ranging social and symbolic significance.