Dostoevsky (33 page)

The information regarding Dostoevsky’s participation in the debates of the Petrashevsky Circle is scanty. Denying to the investigation commission that he had ever held forth at Petrashevsky’s about social or political matters, Dostoevsky admitted that he took the floor twice on other subjects. “
Once about literature
, . . . and the other time
about personality and egoism
.”
³¹
There are, indeed, few traces of Dostoevsky as an active presence in the ample material about the circle that has become available since the 1920s. Only in the very last weeks of its existence does his name figure at all among those who took a leading part in discussion.

Dostoevsky’s reluctance to participate more vigorously in their debates could not have sprung from ignorance. Count Semenov knew Dostoevsky intimately (the lonely young writer frequently visited his apartment) and remembers him as one of the most erudite people he knew; according to Semenov, he had read extensively in the history of the French Revolution (Thiers, Mignet, Louis Blanc), as well as in Socialist theory (Saint-Simon, Fourier).
³²
The list of the works that Dostoevsky withdrew from Petrashevsky’s collection shows that the range of the material he consulted spans the gamut of problems that were being discussed at the meetings. For a firsthand contact with Left Hegelian thought, Dostoevsky took out Strauss’s
Life of Jesus
. Blanc’s three-volume
Histoire des dix ans
covered recent French history and brought him up-to-date on the social-political conditions that had led to the creation of Utopian Socialism. He also withdrew several works of Proudhon (titles unknown), and Paget’s
Introduction à l’étude de la science sociale
—one of the best popularizations of Fourierism then available. In Étienne Cabet’s
Le vrai Christianisme suivant J. Christ
, Dostoevsky came across the argument that total communist egalitarianism was the only true Christianity.

If Dostoevsky did not throw himself more wholeheartedly into the fray at Petrashevsky’s, it was because he was uninterested in the interminable debates over the merits of one or another Socialist system. He was in accord with the moral impulse inspiring them, but he was not persuaded that any of their panaceas could be put into practice. “Socialism offers a thousand methods of social organization,” he commented in his deposition, “and since all of these books are written intelligently, fervently, and often with genuine love for mankind, I read
them with curiosity. But . . . I do not adhere to any of the social systems, . . . and . . . I am convinced that the application of any of them would bring with it inescapable ruin, and I am not talking about us but even in France.”
³³

Although this declaration was made under duress, it expresses an attitude that Dostoevsky shared with many of his contemporaries. Valerian Maikov too had been sympathetic to Socialist ideals but skeptical about the feasibility of any of the specific programs advanced by the various schools, and the same position inspired an important series of articles published in
The Contemporary
in 1847 by Vladimir Milyutin, a brilliant young economist who was an intimate of Maikov and who also turned up at Petrashevsky’s.

Milyutin saw Socialist theories as inspired by an admirably humanitarian aim, but concerned, like Maikov—and Dostoevsky—with the freedom of the individual, he criticized the “new schools” for limiting this freedom drastically. The Utopias of the Socialists are still in what Milyutin calls their mythological-metaphysical phase. Exactly the same idea is expressed in Dostoevsky’s deposition. “Socialism is a science in ferment,” he explained to his judges. “It seems to me, however, that out of the present chaos something consistent, logical, and beneficial will be worked out for the common good.”
³⁴
In contrast to these pieties, Dostoevsky was already thinking along more concrete and down-to-earth lines, linking Socialist ideas with existing Russian conditions. Alexander Milyukov, who belonged to one of the several satellite groups that had now formed around the Petrashevsky Circle, writes in his memoirs that Dostoevsky especially insisted “that all these theories had no importance for us, that we should [look to] the life and age-old historical organizations of our people, where in the
obshchina
[communal ownership of land],
artel
[worker’s wage-sharing cooperative], and in the principles of mutual village responsibility [for the payment of taxes] there have long since existed much more solid and normal foundations than in all the dreams of Saint-Simon and his school. He said that life in an Icarian commune or phalanstery seemed to him more terrible and repugnant than any prison.”
³⁵

More important, however, is that we see another idea emerging in Milyukov’s account. Since “true” or “natural” Socialism is
already
contained in the social institutions of the Russian peasantry, these furnish a basis for the construction of a new social order superior to the artificial Utopias of the Western Socialists. Because this idea is at the heart of the later Russian Populism and was to prove of such tremendous importance for Dostoevsky, Milyukov has been accused of smuggling the opinions of the post-Siberian Dostoevsky back into the 1840s.
³⁶
The evidence, though, tends to confirm Milyukov’s words. Franco Venturi, in his magisterial history of Russian Populism, notes the existence of an embryonic “Populist” wing among the Petrashevtsy.
³⁷
It is within this group—who were following Belinsky’s recent injunction to work out the solution to Russian social problems in Russian terms—that Dostoevsky must be placed.

Dostoevsky’s thoughts, as we see, were thus immovably riveted on Russia and Russian problems. These subjects were rarely discussed at Petrashevsky’s in terms he thought sensible, and so he took the floor only to expound some idea important for his literary work. But if Dostoevsky was known for his indifference whenever the talk revolved around the fine points of Socialist doctrine, he was equally notorious for his impassioned intensity whenever it focused on the problem of serfdom. For there is one overwhelming impression that emerges from all the accounts of Dostoevsky given in the memoirs: he was, literally, someone who found it impossible to control himself whenever he spoke about the mistreatment of the enslaved peasantry.

Count Semenov, present on one such occasion, diagnoses the emotive source of Dostoevsky’s radicalism in the 1840s. “Dostoevsky,” he writes, “was never, and could never be, a
revolutionary
; but, as a man of feeling, he could be carried away by a wave of indignation and even hatred at the sight of violence being perpetrated on the insulted and injured. This happened, for example, when he saw or heard about the sergeant of the Finnish regiment having had to run the gauntlet. Only in such moments of outrage was he capable of rushing into the street with a red flag.”
³⁸

Dostoevsky spoke with uncontrollable fervor at such moments. “I remember very well,” writes Milyukov, “that he was particularly outraged at the mistreatment from which both the lowest class and the youth in school suffered.”
³⁹
These horrors inspired Dostoevsky to sudden outbursts of blazing eloquence. Some members of the circle even felt him to have the makings of a born agitator. It was perhaps Dostoevsky’s volcanic eruptiveness, whenever he spoke about serfdom, that brought him to the attention of the enigmatic and fascinating Nikolay Speshnev. For within the amorphous agglomeration of the Petrashevsky Circle, the iron-willed Speshnev was one of the few ruthlessly determined to turn words into deeds, and he was on the watch for people he might recruit for this purpose. He formed a little circle that was the only true secret society to emerge from the Petrashevsky Fridays, and Dostoevsky was among its members. Not Belinsky or Petrashevsky but Speshnev was Dostoevsky’s mentor in revolutionary radicalism; it was Speshnev who shaped Dostoevsky’s conception of what underground conspiracy meant in practice.

¹
Pis’ma
, 1: 95; September 17, 1846.

²
Ibid., October 7, 1846.

³
Ibid., 103; November 26, 1846.

⁴
D. V. Grigorovich,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
, 12 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1896), 12: 277.

⁵
Cited from the memoirs of Flerovsky in
Sorokovye gody XIX veka
(Moscow, 1959), 191.

⁶
V. I. Kuleshov,
Naturalnaya shkola v literature XIX veka
(Moscow, 1965), 145.

⁷
A. N. Pleshcheev,
Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii
(Leningrad, 1964), 83.

⁸
Valerian Maikov,
Kriticheskie opyty
(St. Petersburg, 1891), 25–31.

⁹
Ibid., 325.

¹⁰
Ibid., 327.

¹¹
Ibid., 342.

¹²
Ibid., 68.

¹³
Ibid., 295.

¹⁴
Ibid., 66.

¹⁵
Ibid., 64.

¹⁶
V. G. Belinsky,
Selected Philosophical Works
(Moscow, 1948), 371.

¹⁷
Ibid., 359–360.

¹⁸
Ibid., 363.

¹⁹
Ibid., 375.

²⁰
Pis’ma
, 1: 106; January–February, 1847.

²¹
Cited in V. I. Semevsky,
M. V. Butashevich–Petrashevsky i Petrashevtsy
(Moscow, 1922), 153.

²²
N. F. Belchikov,
Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev
(Moscow, 1971), 153. This volume, first published in 1936, reproduces all the official documents concerning Dostoevsky’s involvement in the Petrashevsky affair, along with excellent editorial comments and clarification.

²³
Semevsky,
Butashevich–Petrashevsky
, 108.

²⁴
Ibid.

²⁵
DVS
, 1: 169.

²⁶
Miller and Strakhov,
Biografiya
, 91.

²⁷
Yu. Oksman,
Letopis zhizn’ i tvorchestvo V. G. Belinskogo
(Moscow, 1958), 501.

²⁸
DVS
, 1: 181.

²⁹
P. S. Schegolev, ed.,
Petrashevtsy
, 3 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1926–1928), 1: 92.

³⁰
V. R. Leikina, E. A. Korolchuk, and V. A. Desnitsky, eds.,
Delo Petrashevtsev
, 3 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1937–1951), 3: 3–4.

³¹
Belchikov,
Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev
, 106.

³²
DVS
, 1: 209.

³³
Belchikov,
Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev
, 146.

³⁴
Ibid., P. N. Sakulin,
Russkaya literatura i sotsializm
(Moscow, 1922), 174–175.

³⁵
DVS
, 1: 185.

³⁶
See A. S. Dolinin, “Dostoevsky sredi Petrashevtsev,”
Zvenya
6 (Moscow–Leningrad, 1936), 528–529.

³⁷
Franco Venturi,
Roots of Revolution
, trans. Frances Haskell (New York, 1960), 85.

³⁸
DVS
, 1: 211.

³⁹
Ibid., 186.

Nikolay Speshnev—who unquestionably furnished Dostoevsky, twenty years later, with some of the inspiration for the character of Nikolay Stavrogin in
Demons
, stood out among the rather drab personages clustering around Petrashevsky as a bird of a more brilliant plumage. He was, in the first place, a very wealthy landowner. Like Petrashevsky, he had attended the Alexander Lyceum, and the two had known each other as students, but with an arrogant off-handedness typical of his character, Speshnev had not bothered to graduate. He was the only member of the circle who did not have to earn a living, and he was the only one who had traveled to Europe and had enjoyed the cultural advantages of the cosmopolitan life of the Russian gentry.

Bakunin—a product of the same milieu, and who knew a fellow aristocrat when he saw one—was much impressed with Speshnev when they met in Siberia in 1860. “Speshnev,” he wrote to Herzen, “is a remarkable man in many ways: intelligent, cultivated, handsome, aristocratic in bearing, not at all standoffish though quietly cold, inspiring confidence—like every one possessing a quiet strength—a gentleman from head to foot.”
¹
The wife of Nikolay Ogarev, who met him just before his arrest in 1849, describes him as being tall, with finely chiseled features and dark brown hair flowing in waves down to his shoulders; his large blue-gray eyes were, she thought, shadowed by a look of gentle melancholy.
²

Speshnev had lived in Europe between 1842 and 1847, and, when he returned to Petersburg in December of that year, was surrounded with the aureole both of a romantic and a revolutionary legend. Women, as Bakunin notes somewhat enviously, found Speshnev irresistible. “Women are not opposed to a bit of charlatanry,” he sagely informs Herzen, “and Speshnev creates quite an effect: he is particularly good at wrapping himself in the mantle of a deeply pensive and quiet impenetrability.”
³
If we are to believe Bakunin, Speshnev cut a wide swath during 1846 in the Russian-Polish society of Dresden. Whether old or young,
whether mother or daughter, all the women were mad about him. Even more dazzling than this Byronic reputation as a Don Juan was the report that he had taken part in the
Sonderbund
war, which had broken out in 1843 between the liberal and Catholic cantons in Switzerland over the expulsion of the Jesuits. Speshnev was said to have fought as a volunteer with the army of the liberal cantons.