Dostoevsky (175 page)

That evening, a dinner held under the auspices of the Moscow Duma was to be followed by the first of the readings by the important authors present. Also, despite the maneuvers of the Society, Katkov had been invited to speak as a member of the Duma. Gaideburov, editor of the semi-Populist
Week
, who called on Dostoevsky just before dinner, noted his agitation. “I dropped by Dostoevsky’s, and see that he is in a most horrible state; he is somehow twitching all over, in his eyes—anxiety, in his movements—irritation and alarm. I knew he was a highly nervous and impressionable person, who passionately gave himself up to every emotion, but I had never seen him in such a state before.” When Gaideburov asked what was wrong. “ ‘Ah, what will happen, what will happen?’ he exclaimed in answer with despair.”
²⁶
Gaideburov understood him as referring to the impending dinner and Katkov’s speech. The pariah would now be able to speak his mind, and the result might be, as Dostoevsky had feared a day earlier, that people would come to blows.

When Katkov took the floor, however, he spoke of the celebration as a “holiday of peace” and hoped that “perhaps this passing rapprochement will serve us as a pledge for a more durable unity in the future that will lead to the dying out, or at least the mitigation, of hostilities.” He concluded with the famous poetic toast of Pushkin: “Let the sun shine forth, let the darkness cease!” These pacifying words were generally well received and evoked some applause (just how much depended on what newspaper one read). Both Aksakov and Gaideburov rose to congratulate the speaker, but when Katkov extended his arm to clink glasses with Turgenev, the latter turned away. According to Kovalevsky, Dostoevsky and Turgenev spoke about it later in the evening. “There are some things it is impossible to forget,” Turgenev maintained. “How could I extend my hand to a person whom I consider a renegade?”
²⁷

During the dinner on June 6, which began at five o’clock in the afternoon, “two ladies,” as he tells Anna, “brought me flowers,” but this tribute could not overcome his disappointment at what occurred that evening, when he read his assigned pieces, along with Pisemsky, Ostrovsky, Grigorovich, and, of course, the only other participant he cared about—Turgenev. “I read Pimen’s scene,” he writes Anna the next day. “They say I read superbly, but they say they couldn’t hear me very well.” Although he “was greeted wonderfully” and called back three times, he still felt that he had been bested: “Turgenev, who read very badly, was called back more than I was.”
²⁸

Turgenev had been greeted clamorously by the audience, and one of the poems he read, “Again in the Homeland,” had a particular resonance because of
his own self-exile. Dostoevsky, however, suspiciously persisted in believing that Kovalevsky had planted a claque (“a hundred young people shouted in a frenzy when Turgenev came out”) and that its purpose, besides applauding Turgenev, “was to humiliate us [the nonliberals] if we were to go against them.” For all that, he could not complain of any lack of adulation on the part of the public. “The reception offered me yesterday was amazing. During the intermission I went through the hall, and a horde of people, young people, gray-haired people, and ladies, rushed up to me, saying, ‘You are our prophet. You have made us better since we read
The Karamazovs
.’ In short, I am convinced that
The Karamazovs
has colossal significance.”
²⁹
All this appreciation was only a foretaste of what would occur the very next day.

The two most important literary figures at the Pushkin festival were Turgenev and Dostoevsky, and their barely concealed rivalry underlay all the solemn rituals of the occasion. Each gave entirely different readings of Pushkin—Turgenev viewing him in the context of European literature, Dostoevsky proclaiming his genius to be equal to, if not surpassing, anything that European genius had produced. Each presented not only a literary-critical view of Pushkin but also, implicitly, an evaluation of Russian achievement in relation to Europe. The argument, as the audience well understood, was thus only nominally about a literary figure; it was also a replay of the longstanding Westernizer-Slavophil debate carried on in Russian culture all through the nineteenth century. On this occasion, the historical record is clear: Dostoevsky emerged triumphant! He gave the public what it had been waiting to hear, and achieved a victory that astonished even himself.

June 7, the first session of the Pushkin festivities, opened with some words about Pushkin from the only foreign delegate to make the journey, the French Slavist Louis Léger. Telegrams were read from Victor Hugo, Berthold Auerbach, and Alfred Tennyson, but the main event, eagerly awaited by all—if for differing reasons—was Turgenev’s speech. In composing it, Turgenev drew on two lectures he had given on Pushkin in the 1860s and on his famous article, “Recollections of Belinsky,” which had paid tribute to the great critic who had first defined Pushkin’s place in Russian literature. Indeed, much of what Turgenev says about Pushkin’s historical position, compared with that of Lermontov and Gogol, is derived from Belinsky’s famous series of essays on the poet.

He begins by declaring Pushkin to be “the first Russian artist-poet,” and praises him profusely as the founding father of modern Russian literature. Declaring art to be “the embodiment of the ideals lying at the foundation of a people’s [
narodnoi
] life, defining its spiritual and moral physiognomy,” he quickly
moves on to some of the well-known facts of Pushkin’s artistic career.
³⁰
At first imitating foreign models (Voltaire and Byron are mentioned), Pushkin rapidly freed himself from such tutelage and found his own voice. But then, to an audience inflamed by patriotic fervor, Turgenev rather maladroitly equates Pushkin’s rejection of foreign models in his poetry with an equal rejection of Russian folk poetry itself: “The independent genius of Pushkin quickly . . . freed itself from the imitation of foreign forms and from the temptation of the counterfeiting of a folk [
narodnoi
] tonality.” When he yielded to this tempation, as in “Ruslan and Ludmilla,” he produced “the weakest of all his works.” In Russia, “the simple people” (
prostoi narod
) do not read Pushkin any more than the German people read Goethe, the French Molière, or the English Shakespeare. For “every art is the elevating of life based on an ideal, those remaining on the level of ordinary, everyday life remain lower than this ideal level.”
³¹

All the same, Goethe, Molière, and Shakespeare are
narodnoi
poets in the true sense of that word, which Turgenev defines in his own way. For him it means imparting to the values of one’s own culture a national significance, thus attaining a level of universality that transcends mere class or regional boundaries. Such poets unquestionably represent their people, but they have so absorbed its values that they raise those values to the universal level of the ideal. To drive home this point, Turgenev disparages the slogan of “folk-character [
narodnost
’] in art” as the sign of weak, inferior, and enslaved peoples struggling to preserve their existence and identity.
³²
Russia, happily, is not such a country, and there is thus no reason for it to have recourse to such a palliative. At a moment when Populism (
narodnichestvo
) was the dominating social-political, as well as artistic, ideal of the Russian intelligentsia both on the right and on the left, Turgenev was completely at odds with the reigning mood of the vast majority of his audience.

He then raises the crucial question of whether Pushkin can be considered a “national” poet in this sense, equal to Shakespeare, Molière, and Goethe, and replies evasively: “For the moment we shall leave this open.” There is no question, however, that Pushkin “gave us our poetic, our literary language, even though some argue that no such language exists even yet because it can only come from ‘the simple people,’ along with other tradition-preserving institutions” (a passing jab at the virtues attributed to the Russian peasant commune). Pushkin’s language, all the same, expresses the best elements of the Russian character—its “virile charm, strength, and clarity, its straightforward truth, absence of deceit and pose, [its] simplicity, the openness and honesty of its feelings.”
³³
But then, to support such claims, Turgenev invokes remarks made to him by
Victor Hugo and Prosper Merimée, as if his Russian audience were likely to be impressed by the approbation of such eminent foreign authorities. Turgenev also cites Merimée as approving “the absence of any explanations and moral conclusions” in Pushkin’s poetry.
³⁴
What Turgenev offered as artistic praise could well be seen by his audience as a denial that Pushkin’s poetry had any moral significance whatever!

Referring to the radical rejection of Pushkin in the 1860s, which merely developed the critique initiated by Belinsky in the late 1840s, he explains it as a result of “the historical development of society under conditions that gave birth to a new life, which stepped from a literary epoch into a political one.” The adoration of art and Pushkin ceased, and he was replaced by the wrathful Lermontov, the satirical Gogol, and “the poet of revenge and sorrow” (Nekrasov). They won the adherence of succeeding generations and created a different kind of literature more responsive to the moral-social needs of the times.
³⁵

Turgenev thus refuses to condemn the assault on Pushkin by the radicals, which reflected the new realities of Russian life, but he rejoices that this period of artistic inconoclasm appears to be reaching its end. In Pushkin’s day, belles lettres had served as the unique expression of Russian society, but then a time came when the aims of art as such were entirely swept aside. “The previous sphere was too large; the second shrunk it to nothing; finding its natural limits, poetry will be firmly established forever.” And then, perhaps, a poet will appear “who will fully deserve the title of a national-universal poet, which we cannot make up our mind to give to Pushkin, although we do not dare deprive him of it either.”
³⁶

A concluding paragraph of panegyric follows, but the damage had been done. As Dostoevsky wrote to Anna, Turgenev “had denigrated Pushkin by refusing him the title of national poet.”
³⁷
And this was the sentiment of a large part of the audience as well. Turgenev had finally balked, no matter how hesitantly and reluctantly, at placing the Russian among the very first rank of the European poets with whom he had been compared. The exhilaration of the ceremony was badly deflated by this embarrassing denial, which seemed to indicate the continued inferiority of Russian culture, supposedly being celebrated, vis-à-vis Europe.

Turgenev’s talk left his audience with a sense of “dissatisfaction and indistinct vexation,” to quote Strakhov.
³⁸
His subtly balanced considerations tried to unite a eulogy of Pushkin with an apologia for his rejection by the radical critics of the 1860s, and he had also expressed his own opposition, as a liberal Westernizer, to the Slavophil and Populist idolization of “the people.” All these opinions were
hardly in accord with the overheated emotional temperature of the moment, and he was well aware of his failure to stir his audience.

Turgenev’s speech, delivered in the afternoon, was followed by a dinner that evening. “The young people,” Dostoevsky reports to Anna “greeted me at my arrival, treated me, waited on me, made frenzied speeches to me—and that was still before dinner.” Toasts were offered, one by the playwright Ostrovsky to Russian literature, and Dostoevsky was prevailed upon to speak. “I only said a few words—and there was a roar of enthusiasm—literally a roar.” He proposed a toast to Pushkin as one of the greatest poets, “the purest, the most honorable, the most intelligent of all Russian men,” thus giving a foretaste of what he would proclaim the following afternoon.
³⁹
As the party broke up, he was surrounded by a group of young people. In conversation with them, Dostoevsky complained about his illness, which prevented him from working and then, pausing in silence for a moment, he continued: “ ‘I will write my
Children
and die.’ The novel
Children
, according to him, would be the continuation of
The Brothers Karamazov
. In it, the
children
of the preceding novel would come forward as the main heroes.”
⁴⁰

Dostoevsky continues to describe the adulation he received on the night before his speech: “At 9:30 when I got up to go home, they raised a hurrah for me in which even people not in sympathy with me were forced to take part. Then this whole crowd rushed down the stairs with me, and without coats, without hats, followed me onto the street and put me in a cab. And then they suddenly started kissing my hands—and not one, but tens of people, and not just young people, but gray-haired old folks. No, Turgenev just has members of a claque, while mine have true enthusiasm.” “Tomorrow, the eighth, is my most fateful day,” he goes on. “In the morning I read my piece.”
⁴¹