Dostoevsky (38 page)

Dubelt, representing the Third Section, was sharply attentive to the proceedings and intervened frequently in barbed and sarcastic tones. He had been greatly upset on learning that the surveillance of the Petrashevsky Circle had been carried on for over a year without his knowledge, and he regarded this concealment as a personal insult. It was to satisfy a private vendetta, as well as to protect his bureaucratic interests, that he undertook, at every opportunity, to undermine the importance given to the case by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and by his ex-army comrade Liprandi. Jastrzembski, so severe for everyone else, remarks: “I know several instances in which he did as much as he could to help those accused of political crimes, and I do not know of a single instance in which he destroyed anybody.”
¹⁶

The commission interviewed the prisoners individually and questioned them on the basis of the information supplied by Antonelli; they were also asked to answer questions in writing touching on their associations with Petrashevsky and other members of the circle. Additional information was being continuously supplied by the group set up to study the papers and documents confiscated at the time of the arrest, and these of course provided some of the crucial evidence. Dostoevsky was called for questioning several times between April 26 and May 16, and later he told only one rather dubious story to Orest Miller about his treatment: that Rostovtsev had offered him a pardon in exchange for telling about “the whole business.”
¹⁷
Whether true or not, the story indicates that Dostoevsky recalled the interrogation as far more nerve-racking than terrifying.

“When I found myself in the fortress,” Dostoevsky told Vsevolod Solovyev in 1873, “I thought that the end had come, that I would not last three days, and—suddenly I calmed down. Look, what did I do there? I wrote “A Little Hero”—read it, is there any sign of bitterness or torment in it? I dreamed peaceful, fine, good dreams, and then, the longer it lasted, the better it was.”
¹⁸
Dostoevsky’s state of mind, not to mention the state of his health, was much more precarious than he later recalled. But he did find unexpected reserves of inner strength that enabled him to endure the trials of captivity without losing heart, and it was this sense of mastery that dominated in his recollection of the event.

In his first letter from the fortress, written on June 20, Dostoevsky tells Andrey to write the Kumanins in Moscow requesting help for himself and for Mikhail’s family. Most important, though, he wanted to see the latest issue of
Notes of the Fatherland
. “The third part of my novel is appearing, but . . . I didn’t even see the galleys . . . haven’t they disfigured my novel?”
¹⁹
Dostoevsky seems more concerned with this problem than about his personal predicament, and
there is as yet no sign of any emotional perturbation. Some of the other Petrashevtsy began to go to pieces in captivity as the months wore on and the interrogations continued.

At the beginning of July, the prisoners were given permission to receive books and to correspond with the outside world. By this time Mikhail had been released, and Dostoevsky’s letters to him inform us about his physical condition and state of mind. “My health is good,” he writes on July 18, “except for the hemorrhoids and my nervous troubles, which go
crescendo
. I have begun to have nervous spasms as before, my appetite is poor, and I sleep very little, with painful dreams when I do. I sleep about five hours of the twenty-four, and wake up about four times every night.”
²⁰
A month later, he writes: “I have been living on castor oil for a whole month now and it is all that keeps me alive. My hemorrhoids are terribly inflamed and I have a pain in my chest I never had before. Moreover, my impressionability increases, especially at night; I have long, ugly dreams, and to top it all, I have recently felt all the time as though the floor were heaving under me, and I sit in my room literally as if in a ship’s cabin. From all this, I conclude that my nerves are giving way.”
²¹
In mid-September, he writes Mikhail that his health has not improved and that he is anticipating the advent of autumn with misgiving, but that he refuses to lose heart: “I only wish to remain healthy,” he writes, “and anyhow,
a good disposition depends on myself alone
. Man has infinite reserves of toughness and vitality; I really did not think there was so much, but now I know it from experience.”
²²

The moment Dostoevsky was given access to reading material, he threw himself on whatever was available with indiscriminate eagerness, but what he comments on, in his letters to Mikhail, are the new works appearing in
Notes of the Fatherland
—mostly translations. In this period (known as “the era of censorship terror”), Russian literature was muzzled by a censorship fiercer than any it had known for a long time, and few Russian writers were willing to say anything that might be considered in the least provocative. The notoriously obscurantist Count Buturlin, who headed a special commission to tighten the censorship, was reputed to have said that “if the Gospel were not as widespread as it was, it would be necessary to ban it on account of the democratic spirit it disseminated.”
²³
Nonetheless, Dostoevsky tried to write. “I have,” he tells Mikhail in his first letter, “thought out three stories and two novels; one of them I am now writing, but I am afraid to work too much.”
²⁴
In the next letter, he explains why:
“When I was attacked by similar nervous states in the past, I made use of them to write—I can always do more and better writing in this condition—but now I have to hold back, so as not to finish myself off for good.”
²⁵

In prison, the only project Dostoevsky completed was the charming story now called “A Little Hero.” It was given to Mikhail after Dostoevsky had been sent to Siberia, and eight years later it was printed anonymously in
Notes of the Fatherland
. Taking place in a world that Dostoevsky rarely touches: the world of wealthy landowners living on their country estates—the world of Turgenev and Tolstoy—the story is purely personal, a deft psychological sketch notable in Dostoevsky’s work only for the “normalcy” of the youthful passions it depicts. Nevertheless, the main intrigue—the boy’s worshipful adoration of his beloved—is noteworthy, because his love consists in an act of self-sacrifice to aid a suffering soul and in keeping a secret. Might not Dostoevsky have seen himself precisely in some such terms at this particular moment?

As one scrutinizes what Dostoevsky wrote and said—in answer to unspecified accusations, and attempting to parry the suspicions of his interrogators—it is clear that he tried to protect himself as best he could; and he made the same effort on behalf of others. “When I went off to Siberia,” he later wrote, “I took with me at least the consolation of having behaved honorably in the investigation, not imputing my guilt to others, and even sacrificing my own interests if I saw the possibility of protecting others from trouble in my deposition. But I held myself in check. I did not confess everything, and for this I was punished more severely.”
²⁶
The mixed military-civil court that sentenced Dostoevsky gauged the severity of its punishment according to whether the accused had exhibited any repentance or had freely revealed facts otherwise unknown. Dostoevsky did neither.

The most important document that Dostoevsky wrote for the Commission of Inquiry was an “Explanation,” which he was asked to submit immediately after the preliminary questioning on May 6. Even though no formal accusations were ever made, the questions put to him indicated the grounds on which he had been taken into custody. Accordingly, he attempted to clarify his actions so as to justify whatever about them might be considered suspicious or subversive. He gives an image of Petrashevsky as a strange and eccentric character, constantly and fussily occupied with futilities, a person hardly to be taken seriously from any practical point of view and of no possible danger to the state. By inference, Dostoevsky’s participation in such activity was equally innocuous.

Dostoevsky said nothing about the Palm-Durov group because their existence had not yet been discovered. Claiming he had spoken only three times at Petrashevsky’s and only on nonpolitical topics, he attempts to justify what could be considered his “freethinking” and “liberalism.” In the most bizarre vindication recorded in the entire annals of the Petrashevsky proceedings, he maintains that, far from proving any hostility to the régime, whatever inflammatory words he may have uttered should be taken as an exhibition of his trust in the government as the guardian of the rights enjoyed by the citizens of a civilized state! “I was always offended by this fear of speech, much more apt to be offensive to the government than agreeable to it. . . . This means that one assumes the law does not adequately protect the individual, and that it is possible to be destroyed because of an empty word, an incautious phrase.”
²⁷
It is impossible to imagine Dostoevsky advancing such an argument except with bitter irony; no one could believe that the government of Nicholas I was
insulted
by the terrified silence of its citizens and wished them to utter their opinions on social-political topics more vociferously!

Dostoevsky also tried to answer the more concrete charges that he could conceive being leveled against him, and in doing so he discusses his views in a manner that reveals certain patterns of thought whose constancy entitles us to accept them as his genuine convictions. “In the West,” he writes, “a terrible spectacle is taking place. . . . The age-old order of things is cracking and falling to pieces.”
²⁸
In his view “the Western revolution” is “
a historical necessity
of the contemporary crisis in that part of the world.”
²⁹
Dostoevsky has thus already developed his apocalyptic view of Europe on the brink of crisis and collapse, and he also draws the same sharp line between Europe and Russia that was to remain a permanent feature of his thought. Vigorously denying that he considered any such revolution “a historical necessity” for his fatherland, he writes, “In my eyes, nothing could be more nonsensical than the idea of a republican government in Russia.”
³⁰
Dostoevsky had no theoretical objections to autocratic rule; nor, it might be recalled, had most of the early Utopian Socialists, such as Fourier, who appealed unsuccessfully to several monarchs to finance the establishment of phalansteries in their countries. If Dostoevsky was willing to participate in a conspiracy against the autocracy now, it was only because his hatred of serfdom had reached a pitch of intensity that swept aside all ancillary considerations.

Relying on an image popularized in Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
and given authority by the Romantic historian Augustin Thierry, Dostoevsky describes European history as a more than one-thousand-year-old “stubborn struggle between society
and an authority deriving from a foreign civilization of conquest, force, and repression.”
³¹
No such problem existed in Russia, where it had been the native autocracy that time and again had saved the country from enslavement and chaos. Russia had twice been rescued, Dostoevsky writes, “solely by the efforts of the autocracy: first from the Tartars, and second in the reforms of Peter the Great, when solely a warmly childlike faith in its great pilot made it possible for Russia to endure such a sharp swerve into a new life.”
³²
The same view of the providential role of the reigning tsars will crop up again and again in his later utterances.

Indeed, Dostoevsky would have welcomed a tsar willing to save the country again by eliminating the intolerable blight of serfdom. “If reforms are pending,” he writes, “such reforms must come from an authority even much more reinforced during this period; otherwise, the matter will have to be dispatched in a revolutionary fashion. I do not think that admirers of a Russian revolt can be found in Russia. Well-known examples are recalled to this day, though they occurred long ago.”
³³
This menacing reference to the bloody uprisings of Pugachev and Stenka Razin, prefiguring the kind of revolts that might be provoked again unless liberating changes were made, was hardly calculated to reassure Dostoevsky’s judges. But when all hope of such reforms “from above” had been crushed after 1848, it was such reasoning that had persuaded Dostoevsky to participate in the desperate venture organized by Speshnev. Dostoevsky writes in conclusion: “I recall my words, repeated by me at various times, that everything of any value in Russia, beginning with Peter the Great, invariably came from above, from the throne; while from below, up to the present, nothing had been manifested except obstinacy and ignorance. This opinion of mine is well known to my acquaintances.”
³⁴

The gravest charge that Dostoevsky knew had been made against him was that he had read aloud Belinsky’s
Letter to Gogol
, which is equally violent against all those institutions of throne, state, and church that the erstwhile satirist had taken under his wing. Dostoevsky claimed that he had read the exchange of letters in a perfectly neutral manner, and he blocks in a picture of his personal relations with the most notorious radical of his time as a way of justifying his interest in the explosive missive. “I criticized him for striving to give literature a partial significance unworthy of it,” he writes, “degrading it to the description . . . 
solely
of journalistic facts
or scandalous occurrences. . . . [You] only bore everybody to death when you clutch at everyone coming and going in the street . . . and begin to preach at him forcibly and teach him reason. Belinsky became angry with me, and finally from coolness it came to a formal quarrel, so that we did not see each other all through the last year of his life.”
³⁵