Dostoevsky (169 page)
Authors: Joseph Frank
In response to another criticism by the editor of “a needless particularity,” a euphemism for an indecent detail about the child whose face had been smeared with excrement, Dostoevsky insists that this observation of Ivan’s character is crucial for communicating the complexity he wishes to convey about Ivan’s personality. “If a twenty-three-year-old notices, that means he took it to heart. It means that he turned [the details] over in his mind, that he was an advocate of children, and no matter how heartless he is presented there later, compassion and the most sincere love of children remain in him still.”
9
Ivan’s deep-rooted trait of character should influence the manner in which the reader regards him: “This Ivan then obliquely commits a crime . . . in the name of an idea, with which then he was not able to cope; and he gives himself up precisely because, it may be, that once, at some time, his heart, dwelling on the suffering of children, did not overlook such a seemingly insignificant circumstance.”
10
In mid-June Dostoevsky sent off to Lyubimov “The Grand Inquisitor,” accompanied by a commentary. “It finishes up,” he explained, “
what the mouth
speaking great things and blasphemies says
.”
11
“A contemporary negator,” Dostoevsky goes on,
one of the most ardent, comes right out and declares himself in favor of what the devil advocates, and asserts this is truer for people’s happiness than is Christ. To our Russian Socialism, which is so stupid (but also dangerous, because the young generation is with it), the lesson, it would seem, is very forceful—one’s daily bread, the Tower of Babel (i.e., the future reign of Socialism), and the complete enslavement of freedom of conscience—that is the ultimate goal of this desperate denier and atheist!
The difference is that our Socialists (and they are not just underground Nihilist scum—you know that) are conscious Jesuits and liars who do not admit that their idol consists of violence to man’s conscience and the leveling of mankind to a herd of cattle, while my Socialist (Ivan Karamazov) is a sincere person who comes right out and admits that he agrees with the Inquisitor’s view of humanity and that Christ’s faith (allegedly) elevated man to a much higher level than where he actually stands. The question is stated in its boldest form: ‘Do you despise humanity or admire it, its future saviors?’ And all of this for them is allegedly in the name of love of humanity: Christ’s law, they claim, is burdensome and abstract, and too heavy for weak people to bear—and instead of the law of Freedom and Enlightenment, they offer them the law of chains and enslavement through bread.
12
Once more Dostoevsky does everything in his power to allay the fears of his editors. “In the next book the elder Zosima’s death and deathbed conversations with his friends will occur. . . . If I succeed, I’ll have . . . forced people to recognize that a pure, ideal Christian is not an abstract matter but one graphically real, possible, standing before our eyes, and that Christianity is the only refuge of the Russian land from its evils. I pray God I’ll succeed; the piece will be moving, if only my inspiration holds out. . . . The whole novel is being written for its sake, but only let it succeed, that’s what worries me now!”
13
Writing to his journalist friend Putsykovich on the same day, Dostoevsky voices all his trepidation over the reception of his recent chapters: “in my novel I’ve had to present several ideas and positions that, as I feared, would not be much to their liking, since until the conclusion of the novel these ideas and positions really can be misinterpreted; and now, just as I feared, it has happened;
they’re caviling at me; Lyubimov sends the proofs and makes notes and puts question marks in the margins. I’ve prevailed, with difficulty, so far, but I very much fear for yesterday’s mailing for June, that they’ll rear up and tell me they can’t print it.”
14
The notes for Book 5 contain passages concerning the Inquisitor that are much more provocative than those eventually used. One of the bluntest challenges to Christ, for example, is the Inquisitor’s charge: “I have only one word to say to thee, that thou hast been disgorged from Hell and art a heretic” (15: 232), but none of this imagery was kept. As Edward Wasiolek has written, these notes contain a much clearer assertion that “it is Christ who is guilty and cruel, and it is the Grand Inquisitor who is kind and innocent. It is Christ who demands that men suffer for Him, whereas the Grand Inquisitor suffers for men.”
15
Dostoevsky’s notes contain no reference to sources for the Legend, though central of course are the New Testament accounts of the three temptations of Christ by Satan. As for the character of the Inquisitor, the incarnation of spiritual despotism over the conscience of mankind, his prototype can be found in Schiller’s
Don Carlos
, translated by Mikhail Dostoevsky in the 1840s. The play shares the same justification for the existence of evil in the world, the same answer to the problem of theodicy, that is at the heart of Dostoevsky’s Legend—and indeed, at the heart of his religious worldview. This answer is given in the great scene in which the Marquis of Posa tries to persuade King Philip of Spain to grant freedom of conscience to his Protestant subjects in the Netherlands. Turning to the examples of nature and of the world for his argument, the marquis urges Philip to recognize that God himself allows evil to exist rather than interfere with the moral-spiritual freedom of mankind—the freedom to choose between good and evil:
. . . Look about you
At the splendors of nature! On freedom
Is it founded—and how rich it is
Through Freedom—He, the great Creator—
—He—. . . So as not to disturb the enchanting
Appearance of Freedom—
He leaves the dreadful army of evils
To rage in his universe—He, the artist,
Remains invisible, modestly He
Hides himself in eternal laws.
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This is the fundamental idea that Dostoevsky had already expressed when interpreting the first temptation, “turning stones into bread,” and explaining why God had not provided mankind with
both
beauty and bread.
With the Legend, Dostoevsky told his editor he “had achieved the culminating height of his literary activity.” When his friend Putsykovich asked why he gave such importance to the Legend, Dostoevsky replied that he “had carried the theme of the Legend in his soul, so to speak, during the whole course of his life, and wished particularly now to place it in circulation since he did not know if he would ever again succeed in printing something important.” The Legend, he added, was directed “against Catholicism and the papacy, and particularly . . . the period of the Inquisition, which had such awful effects on Christianity and on all of humanity.”
17
Even though Dostoevsky said nothing about Socialism in these remarks, both Socialism and Catholicism had become identical for him as embodiments of the first and third temptations of Christ, the betrayal of Christ’s message of spiritual freedom in exchange for bread, and the aspiration toward earthly power.
Dostoevsky’s schedule required him to send off a text on the tenth of each month, and he tried to snatch some time between installments to keep in touch with friends. A consoling letter to Anna Filosofova, not yet in exile, responds to her truly agonizing situation. “I was,” she wrote, “between two fires: on the one hand, my husband received proclamations from the nihilists that they would kill him; on the other, the government sent my son into exile, and threatens me with the same.” As for herself, she had written to her husband: “You know very well that I hate our present government . . . that band of brigands, who are bringing Russia to ruin.”
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Even while trying to raise her spirits, Dostoevsky confesses that he is “depressed” himself. “The main thing is that my health has gotten worse, the children have all been ill—the weather is horrible, impossible, it rains buckets from morning to night . . . it’s cold, damp, . . . In that state of mind . . . I was writing the whole time, working nights, listening to the high wind howling and breaking hundred-year-old trees.”
19
By this time, he had decided to travel to Bad Ems once again and told his editors that it was impossible for him to complete the work in one year. In addition to his health, he wrote, “I want it to be finished off well, and there’s an idea in it that I would like to put forth as clearly as possible. It contains the trial and punishment
of . . . Ivan Karamazov.”
20
His trial and punishment are of course moral-psychological; and Dostoevsky gives them so much importance because, through the depiction of Ivan’s inner torments, he was attempting to undermine from within the intense humanitarian pathos of the Populist ethic. On July 17, having abandoned his previous deadline, Dostoevsky left Staraya Russa for Petersburg, Berlin, and Bad Ems.
He arrived in Petersburg on July 18, after a grueling trip that left him, as he wrote to Anna, “collapsing from exhaustion . . . my head is spinning, and I can see spots before my eyes.” Despite feeling that “I’ve grown as weak as a five-year-old child,”
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he staunchly went about completing the preparations for his journey. First collecting the money for the recent chapters of his novel, he then went off to the Blockhead embassy (as he called the Germans) to obtain a visa. The trip to Berlin was equally exhausting; nor did he particularly wish to see the awaiting Putsykovich, who was attempting to establish another version of
The Citizen
on German soil. The two men went to visit the aquarium, the museum, and the Tiergarten, and Dostoevsky found himself, despite his prior determination, “paying for his beer, at the restaurant, the cabby, and so on.” Moreover, “he borrowed forty-five marks from me for paper and stamps (postage) for the first issue, which will come out in a week.”
22
Dostoevsky’s liberality, one assumes, was prompted by his willingness to support the new journal.
He reached Ems on July 24 and immediately went to see Dr. Orth. “He found,” Dostoevsky reports to Anna, “that a part of my lung had moved from the spot and changed position, just as my
heart
also has changed from its former position and is now located in another one—all as a consequence of the emphysema, although he added by way of consolation the heart is absolutely healthy, and all these changes don’t mean very much either and are no special threat.” Far from being reassured, he adds that “if the emphysema, still just at the outset, has already produced such effects, what’s going to happen later?” A program of gargling and drinking the two types of curative waters (Kranchen and Kesselbrunnen) was prescribed, and he writes with hope that “I’m relying on the waters greatly and began drinking them today.”
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Dostoevsky’s final stay in Bad Ems was marked by the loneliness and isolation he had anticipated before departing, and his reaction to the environment of the fashionable spa, already quite atrabilious, reached a new pitch of irascibility. His anti-Semitism came into full play as well, though he exhibited a fine impartiality in scattering his abuse right and left. It is somewhat ironic that, concurrently,
he was working to complete his chapters on the teachings of Zosima, whose message of love and universal reconciliation he hoped would answer the anathemas of Ivan Karamazov. One can hardly imagine a writer whose everyday feelings and emotions were more at odds with the sentiments he was pouring into his artistic work.
If Putsykovich had one virtue it was that of persistence, and he knew that Dostoevsky’s name would provide a much-needed luster to his proposed journal. Reminding Dostoevsky of his promise to support the launch of the journal, he received on July 28 a letter for publication testifying that the journal’s orientation “is sincere and incorruptible.”
24
This official letter was accompanied by a private one in which once again Dostoevsky gives rein to his dislike of “the polyglot crowd, almost half of them rich Yids from all over the globe.” In this connection, he calls Putsykovich’s attention to an article he had read in Katkov’s newspaper,
Moscow News
(
Moskovskie Vedomosti
), which summarized “a German tract that has just appeared:
Where Is the Jew Here?
Interestingly, it coincides with my own thought just as soon as I entered Germany: that the Germans will become completely Judaized and are losing their old national spirit.”
25
The brochure mentioned in this article was a reply to another, from the pen of an ex-Socialist turned anti-Semite, which had attacked the growing Jewish influence on German life. As Dostoevsky wrote to Pobedonostsev, he took this controversy as confirmation of his own opinion that in Germany “there’s the influence of the Jew everywhere.”
26
In a letter to Pobedonostsev, he describes himself as “being sick and over-anxious in my soul,” attributing his lamentable state of mind “to the depressing impression from observing what has been going on in the ‘Madhouse’ of the Russian press and the intelligentsia too. . . . ‘Pan-European’ ideas of learning and enlightenment stand despotically over everyone, and no one dares state his opinion.” These issues had worked up Dostoevsky to the point of “being tormented by the desire to continue the
Diary
, since I really do have things to say . . . without fruitless, uncouth polemic, but instead with firm, fearless words.”
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