Dostoevsky (3 page)

Hanne Winarsky, the literary editor of Princeton University Press, kept a close eye on the enterprise as it was being carried out, and I should like to thank her most gratefully for her comments and suggestions. Robin Feuer Miller, whose own book on
The Idiot
is a major contribution to the comprehension of this most autobiographical of Dostoevsky’s novels, also must be thanked most warmly. Her detailed comparison of the new one-volume version with the original five volumes was invaluable in scrutinizing the work of transformation, and I can only add my own voice to that of the appreciation equally expressed in the note of the editor herself.

My wife, Marguerite Frank, a professional and published mathematician and a discriminating and avid reader of literature as well, has been a sharp and discerning critic of all of my volumes. Through these many years she has helped me to maintain them as close as possible to the highest intellectual and literary standards. In this instance she was dissatisfied with my treatment of perhaps the most complex of all the female characters in Dostoevsky’s novels, the beautiful and ill-fated Nastasya Filippovna of
The Idiot
. In the past, I had always used her comments to guide my own revisions. But now she so much altered and enriched my own initial view that I asked her to express them herself; and the pages devoted to Nastasya Filippovna in the present book thus come from her pen. Let me conclude by citing what I wrote in the Preface to my fifth volume: “Nothing I can say will adequately express what every one of my books owes to her participation.”

For Russian words, I use the Library of Congress system without diacritics, and I use -
ya
instead of -
ia
and -
yu
instead of -
iu
, the adjectival endings -
yi
and -
ii
are rendered by -
y
:
yurodivy
instead of
yurodivyi
,
Dostoevsky
instead of
Dostoevskii
. The soft sign is omitted in proper names:
Gogol
rather than
Gogol
’.

Citations to Dostoevsky’s texts and correspondence are made to the volumes of the great Academy of Sciences edition: F. M. Dostoevsky,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
, 30 vols. (Leningrad, 1972–1990). For the other texts cited here, I have used the translation of
Diary of a Writer
by Kenneth Lantz. For my quotations from Dostoevsky’s early short stories and novels up to and including
Notes from Underground
, I have used the translations of Constance Garnett (altering her version where this seemed indicated). For the later novels, I have consulted various translations: those of Constance Garnett, Jessie Coulson, and Richard Pevear and Larissa volokhonsky for
Crime and Punishment
; for
The Idiot
, Constance Garnett; for
The Gambler
, Victor Terras and Constance Garnett; for
The Eternal Husband
, Constance Garnett; for
Demons
, David Magarshack and Constance Garnett; for
A Raw Youth
, the translations of both Constance Garnett and Andrew McAndrew. For
The Brothers Karamazov
, I have used mainly the translation of Constance Garnett revised by Ralph Matlaw, but supplemented with the versions of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, as well as that of Ignat Avsey.

All citations have been checked with the Russian text and alterations made as necessary.

The last years of the reign of Alexander I were a troubled, uncertain, and gloomy time in Russian history. Alexander had come to the throne as the result of a palace revolution against his father, Paul I, whose increasingly erratic and insensate rule led his entourage to suspect madness. The coup was carried out with at least the implicit consent of Alexander, whose accession to power, after his father’s murder, at first aroused great hopes of liberal reform in the small, enlightened segment of Russian society. Alexander’s tutor, selected by his grandmother Catherine the Great, had been a Swiss of advanced liberal views named La Harpe. This partisan of the Enlightenment imbued his royal pupil with republican and even democratic ideas; and during the first years of his reign, Alexander surrounded himself with a band of young aristocrats sharing his progressive persuasions. A good deal of work was done preparing plans for major social reforms, such as the abolition of serfdom and the granting of personal civil rights to all members of the population. Alexander’s attention, however, was soon diverted from internal affairs by the great drama then proceeding on the European stage—the rise of Napoleon as a world-conqueror. Allied at first with Napoleon, and then becoming his implacable foe, Alexander I led his people in the great national upsurge that resulted in the defeat of the Grand Army and its hitherto invincible leader.

The triumph over Napoleon brought Russian armies to the shores of the Atlantic and exposed both officers and men (the majority of the troops were peasant serfs) to prolonged contact with the relative freedom and amenities of life in Western Europe. It was expected that, in reward for the loyalty of his people, Alexander would make some spectacular gesture consonant with his earlier intentions and institute the social reforms that had been put aside to meet the menace of Napoleon. But the passage of time, and the epochal events he had lived through, had not left Alexander unchanged. More and more he had come under the influence of the religious mysticism and irrationalism so prevalent in the immediate post-Napoleonic era. Instead of reforms, the period between 1820 and 1825 saw an intensification of reaction and the repression of any overt manifestation of liberal ideas and tendencies in Russia.

Meanwhile, secret societies—some moderate in their aims, others more radical—had begun to form among the most brilliant and cultivated cadres of the
Russian officers’ corps. These societies, grouping the scions of some of the most important aristocratic families, sprang from impatience with Alexander’s dilatoriness and a desire to transform Russia on the model of Western liberal and democratic ideas. Alexander died unexpectedly in November 1825, and the societies seized the opportunity a month later, at the time of the coronation of Nicholas I, to launch a pitifully abortive eight-hour uprising known to history as the Decembrist insurrection. An apocryphal story about this event has it that the mutinous troops, told to shout for “Constantine and
konstitutsiya
” (Constantine, the older brother of Nicholas, had renounced the throne and had a reputation as a liberal), believed that the second noun, whose gender in Russian is feminine, referred to Constantine’s wife. Whether true or only a witticism, the story highlights the isolation of the aristocratic rebels; and their revolution was crushed with a few whiffs of grapeshot by the new tsar, who condemned five of the ringleaders to be hanged and thirty-one to be exiled to Siberia for life. Nicholas thus provided the nascent Russian intelligentsia with its first candidates for the new martyrology that would soon replace the saints of the Orthodox Church.

Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on October 3, 1821, just a few years before this crucial event in Russian history, and these events were destined to be interwoven with his life in the most intimate fashion. The world in which Dostoevsky grew up lived in the shadow of the Decembrist insurrection and suffered from the harsh police-state atmosphere instituted by Nicholas I to ensure that nothing similar could occur again. The Decembrist insurrection marked the opening skirmish in the long and deadly duel between the Russian intelligentsia and the supreme aristocratic power that shaped the course of Russian history and culture in Dostoevsky’s lifetime. And it was out of the inner moral and spiritual crises of this intelligentsia—out of its self-alienation and its desperate search for new values on which to found its life—that the child born in Moscow at the conclusion of the reign of Alexander I would one day produce his great novels.

Of all the great Russian writers of the first part of the nineteenth century—Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Herzen, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Nekrasov—Dostoevsky was the only one who did not come from a family belonging to the landed gentry. This is a fact of great importance, and influenced the view he took of his own position as a writer. Comparing himself with his great rival Tolstoy, as he did frequently in later life, Dostoevsky defined the latter’s work as being that of a “historian,” not a novelist. For, in his view, Tolstoy depicted the life “which existed in the tranquil and stable, long-established Moscow landowners’ family of the middle-upper stratum.” Such a life, with its settled traditions of culture and fixed moral-social norms, had become in the nineteenth century that of only a small “minority” of Russians; it was “the life of the exceptions.” The life of the majority, on the other hand, was one of confusion and moral chaos. Dostoevsky felt that his own work was an attempt to grapple with the chaos of the present, while Tolstoy’s
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
and
War and Peace
(he had these specifically in mind) were pious efforts to enshrine for posterity the beauty of a gentry life already vanishing and doomed to extinction.
¹

Such a self-definition, made at a later stage of Dostoevsky’s career, of course represents the distillation of many years of reflection on his literary position. But it also throws a sharp light back on Dostoevsky’s past, and helps us to see that his earliest years were spent in an atmosphere that prepared him to become the chronicler of the moral consequences of flux and change, and of the breakup of the traditional forms of Russian life. The lack, during his early years, of a unified social tradition in which he could feel at home unquestionably shaped his imaginative vision, and we can also discern a rankling uncertainty about status that helps to explain his acute understanding of the psychological scars inflicted by social inequality.

On his father’s side, the Dostoevskys had been a family belonging to the Lithuanian nobility. The family name came from a small village (Dostoevo, in
the district of Pinsk) awarded to an ancestor in the sixteenth century. Falling on hard times, the Orthodox Dostoevskys sank into the lowly class of the non-monastic clergy. Dostoevsky’s paternal great-grandfather was a Uniat archpriest in the Ukrainian town of Bratslava; his grandfather was a priest of the same persuasion; and this is where his father was born. The Uniat denomination was a compromise worked out by the Jesuits as a means of proselytizing among the predominantly Orthodox peasantry of the region: Uniats continued to celebrate the Orthodox rites, but accepted the supreme authority of the pope.

Since the non-monastic clergy in Russia form a caste rather than a profession or a calling, Dostoevsky’s father was naturally destined to follow the same career as
his
father. But, after graduating from a seminary at the age of fifteen, he slipped away from home, made his way to Moscow, and there gained admittance to the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy in 1809. Assigned to service in a Moscow hospital during the campaign of 1812, he continued to serve in various posts as a military doctor until 1821, when, aged thirty-two, he accepted a position at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, located on the outskirts of Moscow. His official advancement in the service of the state was steady, and in April 1828, being awarded the order of St. Anna third class “for especially zealous service,”
²
he was promoted to the rank of collegiate assessor. This entitled him to the legal status of noble in the official Russian class system, and he hastened to establish his claim to its privileges. On June 28, 1828, he inscribed his own name and that of his two sons, Mikhail and Feodor (aged eight and seven, respectively), in the rolls of the hereditary nobility of Moscow.