Dostoevsky (63 page)

14. Nikolay Strakhov in the 1850s

If Dostoevsky received a certain intellectual schooling from Strakhov, what he derived from Apollon Grigoryev stirred much deeper levels of his personality. Grigoryev had long been a well-known man of letters and by 1861 was near the end of a stormy existence as a poet, critic, and occasional writer of prose fiction. He was a charismatic presence who exercised his fascination on a whole group of young contributors, including Strakhov, who later collected and published his critical essays, and the daily editorial meetings of
Time
provided ample opportunity for the exchange of ideas. Dostoevsky would certainly have found the tempestuous Grigoryev more to his taste as a human being than the prudish, finicky Strakhov. For Grigoryev was one of those “broad” Russian natures—much like the young poet Shidlovsky, the friend and inspirer of Dostoevsky in his youth—who combined the most refined and exalted artistic and spiritual aspirations with drink-sodden and disorderly lives.

“Mystic, atheist, Freemason, member of the Petrashevsky circle, artist, poet, editor, critic, dramatist, journalist, singer, guitarist, orator”—these are some of the disparate aspects of Grigoryev as seen through the eyes of his contemporaries.
⁸
Dostoevsky wrote that Grigoryev “was, perhaps, of all his contemporaries . . . the most Russian of men as a temperament (I am not saying—as an ideal, that is understood)” (20: 136). His poetry and criticism were held in great esteem by some of the best judges of his time, but he would disappear for weeks on end to indulge in drunken sprees and riotous debauches among the Gypsies, and many of his best essays were written in debtors’ prisons. “I remember him,” writes one of his closest friends, the poet Polonsky, “believing neither in God nor the Devil—and on his knees in church, praying to the last drop of his blood. I remember him as a skeptic and as a mystic, I remember him as a friend and enemy, fighting with people and flattering Count Kushelev [the owner of a periodical] about his infantile compositions.”
⁹
It has been suggested that traits of Grigoryev, who liked to call himself “the last Romantic,” were later embodied in the equally tumultuous and surprisingly poetic Dimitry Karamazov.
¹⁰

For Grigoryev, the true values of Russian life were to be found not in a chimerical and idealized Eden before Peter or in the downtrodden peasantry but rather among those surviving groups—like the Moscow merchant class depicted in Ostrovsky’s plays, often staunch Old Believers—who had managed to flourish while zealously clinging to their own mode of existence. He was himself a great connoisseur of Russian folk culture and of the Gypsy music he found so irresistible. Some of his best poems, rediscovered and collected at the beginning of the present century by Alexander Blok, attempt to translate the fiery passion and despairing poignancy of his Gypsy revels into words.

15. Apollon Grigoryev in the 1850s

Grigoryev’s mature essays sketch an original philosophy of Russian culture whose major theses certainly affected Dostoevsky’s own opinions. The central figure in this history is Pushkin, whose work, as Grigoryev interprets it, marks a watershed in Russian cultural self-consciousness. Before Pushkin, foreign influences had been accepted, assimilated, and revered, but in Pushkin, for the first time, one can observe a struggle between the “predatory” types that imitated Western paradigms—the egoistic Romantic and Byronic heroes of his early poetry—and the gently ironical Ivan Petrovich Belkin or the youthfully pure-hearted narrator of
The Captain’s Daughter
by whom they are replaced. These are purely Russian characters in their mildness, unaffectedness, and simplicity; and they indicate Pushkin’s desire to return to his native soil, with its “truly human, i.e., Christian”
¹¹
values, after succumbing to the seduction of foreign ideals. Grigoryev sees all of post-Pushkin Russian literature in terms of this struggle between “predatory” (
khishchny
) and Russian “meek” (
smirenny
) types, and he
works out his cultural typology in a whimsically breathless and involuted style reminiscent of his beloved Thomas Carlyle. His essays contain both broadly impressive generalizations and penetrating observations on a host of writers up to and including contemporaries such as Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Pisemsky, and he is now generally acknowledged to be the greatest literary critic of mid-nineteenth-century Russia.

Grigoryev’s ideas helped to give a concrete literary-cultural content to Dostoevsky’s own most intimate experiences. The “return to one’s native soil,” whose necessity had presented itself to him so agonizingly in the prison camp, now proved to be the path taken by the greatest of all Russian writers—and it was the one destined to be followed by all Russian literature! For Dostoevsky, Grigoryev’s contention that “meek” types are the true carriers of Russian moral-social values would have been taken as precious confirmation of his own artistic premonitions. Much of Dostoevsky’s later works may indeed be seen as a dramatization of the conflict between Grigoryev’s “predatory” Western (or Western-influenced) types and genuinely Russian “meek” ones—a conflict whose clash of values, portrayed as a duel between moral-spiritual absolutes, he would one day succeed in raising to the level of high tragedy.

Grigoryev also shared with Dostoevsky a view of art as a means of metaphysical cognition—the chosen vehicle by which the secrets of the Absolute reveal themselves in time and history. Both men defended the status of art against the mocking onslaught of the radical Utilitarians. Grigoryev drew the same conclusion as his Danish predecessor, Kierkegaard, that life could not be contained within rational categories of any kind. “To me ‘life’ is truly something mysterious,” he writes Dostoevsky, “it is something inexhaustible, ‘an abyss which swallows all finite reason,’ to use an expression from an old mystic book, a boundless space in which the logical conclusions of the cleverest mind will often get lost, like a wave in the ocean; [life is] even something ironic, but at the same time full of love, in spite of this irony.”
¹²

One passage from a letter of Grigoryev to Apollon Maikov, written while Dostoevsky was still in Siberia and hence before the two men could have exchanged ideas, will illustrate this similarity in fundamental outlook: “I do not know what I find more repulsive: Petersburgian progress . . . the dilettantism of orthodoxy, or finally the cynical atheism of Herzen. All these amount to the same thing and have the same value, and ‘these three’ all come equally from one cause: from a lack of faith in life, the ideal and art. All this results from the
utilitarian
Utopia of sensual felicity or spiritual slavery and Chinese stagnation under the pressure of
external
unity in the absence of inner unity, i.e., Christ, i.e., the Ideal, i.e.,
Measure
, Beauty, in which alone truth is contained and which
alone can bring truth to man’s soul.”
¹³
The identification of Christ in this passage with the Ideal and with Beauty could not be more Dostoevskian.

Most striking of all, perhaps, is the temperamental affinity revealed by Grigoryev’s reference, in a line of his poetry, to “the mad happiness of suffering,” and by his reiteration, in a letter, that “there are sufferings of the soul capable of passing over into a sense of beatitude.” How can one not think of Dostoevsky, asks the Italian Slavist Wolf Giusti, after reading such utterances?
¹⁴
Both men share a common devotion to the Christian faith as it had developed in their homeland, and just as Dostoevsky had recently declared, with reference to the Christian Crusades, that “Europe and its task will be completed by Russia,”
¹⁵
so Grigoryev believed that the historical life of Europe was “exhausted, and another is beginning; it will come out of Orthodoxy, a new world lies in this force.”
¹⁶
But, again like Dostoevsky, he was too much a product of Romanticism and too much a modern to accept either his Christian faith or Orthodoxy without a struggle. “From wherever I begin,” he acknowledges, “I always arrive at the same single point: at this deep and sorrowful need to believe in the ideal and the
Jenseits
[the supernatural].”
¹⁷
No Russian contemporary of Dostoevsky comes closer than Grigoryev to sharing the same tangled complexity of impulses and attitudes.

It was with such comrades-in-arms that Dostoevsky sallied forth to participate in the journalistic wars of the 1860s. Victory certainly cannot be said to have attended his banner, but while the
pochvenniki
were in the field, they furnished a respectable opposition to the triumph of what has been called (inaccurately, so far as Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov are concerned) Russian Nihilism. Moreover, these wars served to provide Dostoevsky with the materials that he was soon to transmute and elevate, by the power of his genius and personal vision, into the artistic-ideological synthesis of the great novels of the middle and later 1860s.

With the launching of
Time
, the routine of Dostoevsky’s life was established for the next five years. All of his energies were absorbed by his work both as editor and contributor, and it is impossible to dissociate his private existence from the quotidian task of running the magazine. Its editorial offices were located in the residence of Mikhail Dostoevsky, and both Feodor and Strakhov lived close by, the latter having moved from another apartment specifically to be nearer at hand. This section of the city was a busy and populous lower-class district, whose grimy and muddy streets, always swarming with hordes of merchants, tradesmen, and laborers, Dostoevsky later portrayed in
Crime and Punishment
. And, as Strakhov recalls nostalgically, “amid these surroundings, which filled us with sadness and repulsion, we all lived through very happy years.”
¹⁸

16. Mikhail Dostoevsky’s home and the offices of
Time

Strakhov’s memoirs describe a life of unremitting literary labor, with Dostoevsky working round-the-clock and quitting his desk only to sleep. Dostoevsky wrote at night, starting about midnight and continuing until five or six in the morning; he then slept until two or three, and began his day around that time. The staff of the journal convened at three in the afternoon, “and there [in the offices] we leafed through the newspapers and journals, caught up with everything new, and often then went to dinner together.”
¹⁹
Very often too Dostoevsky visited Strakhov’s daily tea in the early evening, when a group of friends would gather for talk and conviviality.