Dostoevsky (73 page)

The sympathies of most of the intelligentsia, including Feodor and Mikhail Dostoevsky, were on the side of the students. When those arrested were incarcerated in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress, Dostoevsky surely recalled his own long months of solitary confinement in the same forbidding prison. But the students were not suspected of any criminal political conspiracy, visitors could come and go, and gifts from well-wishers poured in to make their lot more comfortable. A large slab of beef was grilled in the apartment of Mikhail Dostoevsky and sent, along with bottles of cognac and red wine, in the name of “the editorial bureau of
Time
,” thus giving a public declaration of the liberalism of the periodical.
⁸

By the fall of 1861, Dostoevsky had already published several installments of
House of the Dead
, and these sketches provided the Russian public with its first terrifying image of what lay ahead for those sentenced for a political crime. “At that time we knew about Siberia through
Notes from the House of the Dead
,” wrote Shelgunov years later, “and this, of course, was quite enough to make us fear for the fate of Mikhailov.”
⁹
No writer was now more celebrated than Dostoevsky, whose name was surrounded with the halo of his former suffering and whose sketches only served to enhance his prestige as a precursor on the path of political martyrdom that so many members of the younger generation might be forced to tread themselves. He was often asked to read from his works by student groups and for the benefit of worthy causes, and he invariably accepted such invitations because he believed it of first importance to keep in touch with his potential readers. As his fame increased, he also hoped that it might be possible to exercise some influence on public opinion.

Nothing untoward occurred at the various benefits in which Dostoevsky participated up through the spring of 1862; but matters took a different turn at a sensational “literary-musical evening” on March 2, which took place before an excitable crowd of three thousand people. The event, which Dostoevsky later enshrined in the masterly fête scene of
Demons
, was organized on behalf of the Literary Fund to help needy students. However, everyone knew, as Shelgunov wrote in his memoirs, that among the “needy students” for whom the flower of the cultured public wished to raise money were Mikhailov and Obruchev,
¹⁰
and the social-political character of the evening was accentuated by other details.

The literati invited to participate were all of a progressive or radical complexion: Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov, V. S. Kurochkin, editor of the radical satirical journal
The Spark
(
Iskra
)—and a Professor Pavlov, initiator of the Sunday-school movement, whose favorite slogan, “La révolution par l’école,” was being taken quite literally by some teachers, who used the classroom to indoctrinate their pupils in favor of atheism and subversion. Henrik Wienawski, Anton Rubinstein, and the leading soprano of the Italian opera had agreed to take charge of the musical interludes—and if Rubinstein played his piano transcription of Beethoven’s
The Ruins of Athens
(1811) it was because this work, as was well known, had been composed in honor of the Greek revolt against the Turkish Empire.

Dostoevsky opened the program, and he read from some still unpublished chapters of
House of the Dead
describing the death of a soldier from consumption in the prison hospital. The name of this soldier also turned out to be Mikhailov, and the death scene is embellished with those Dickensian details that
Dostoevsky loved to employ. He dwelled on the emaciated body of the twenty-five-year-old, and the iron fetters that prison regulations would not allow to be removed. The grizzled sentry summoned to carry out the corpse is so moved by the piteous sight that he takes off his helmet and sword belt and crosses himself. One can well imagine the moving effect of this passage, with its constant repetition of the name, on those many people who knew the other Mikhailov well and were filled with ominous premonitions about his future.

Yet the audience response to Dostoevsky was as nothing compared to the veritable hurricane aroused by the intervention of Professor Pavlov, who had announced a lecture titled “A Thousand Years of Russian History.” The millennium of Russia had been celebrated that very year with a great display of official pomp, and Pavlov’s speech, duly submitted to the censorship, had been approved for delivery. But the nervous and highly volatile Pavlov, who is mentioned in the memoirs of the left-wing L. F. Panteleev as “not a completely normal person,”
¹¹
whipped the audience into hysteria by his manner of delivery. Speaking in a quavering voice that sometimes rose to a shriek, he accentuated the words of his text so as to turn them into an implacable indictment of Russian history under its thousand years of autocratic rule. Shelgunov provides his firsthand report: “In the hall one could hear a growing rumble, there were shouts of furious exhilaration, seats were rattled, heels were pounded. I was sitting on the platform with others, among them Nekrasov, awaiting his turn. The agitated E. P. Kovalevsky [the president of the Literary Fund] ran up, and, turning to us, said: ‘Stop him! Stop him! Tomorrow he’ll be sent away!’ But it was impossible to get Pavlov off the platform; more and more carried away, he finished his talk amidst the deafening shouts of the public and left the platform.”
¹²
The audience had been worked up to an indescribable pitch of enthusiasm, and the applause was not only ear-shattering but climaxed by a ringing chorus of the
Marsellaise
. Kovalevsky’s prediction proved correct: the next day Pavlov was sent into provincial exile and allowed to return to the capital only several years later.

Unlike Dostoevsky’s fête scene, which terminates in pandemonium, the audience in the hall eventually calmed down, and the evening ended with a rousing version of Glinka’s “Kamarinskaya,” a symbol of peasant earthiness and self-assertion. So many encores were requested that a well-bred agent of the secret police, in his report, indignantly commented on the “indelicacy” of dragging out the evening for so long that ladies had been pinned to their seats for seven hours.
¹³

As a protest against Pavlov’s exile, Petersburg students now boycotted the informal courses organized by faculty to replace the regular classes. Professors were asked to join the movement by canceling their lectures, and those who refused were mercilessly harassed. The authorities themselves finally decided to terminate the de facto university, which had been given permission to use certain official buildings for its courses. “The reason for the destruction of the [free] university,” Strakhov wrote nineteen years later, “was the famous ‘literary-musical evening.’ . . . The noise and enthusiasm were enormous, and it has always seemed to me since that the evening was the highest point reached by the liberal movement of our society, as well as the culmination of our cloud-castle revolution.”
¹⁴
After this scandalous demonstration, Strakhov explains, it became clear that “every liberal measure aroused a movement in society that used such a measure for its own ends, which were not liberal at all but entirely radical.”
¹⁵
This is the conclusion that Dostoevsky also began to draw, but rather than joining in the hue and cry against the radicals, he urgently tried to warn them against the consequences of their own folly.

Historians do not agree with Strakhov’s judgment that the literary-musical evening was the highest crest reached by the pounding wave of social-political unrest during the spring of 1862. The true peak of the era of proclamations arrived two months later, in mid-May, when a leaflet entitled
Young Russia
was circulated. It is this remarkable document that brought the revolutionary ferment of the time to its convulsive climax.

The tsarist authorities never discovered that its author was a twenty-year-old youth, P. G. Zaichnevsky, who already had acquired a considerable underground past despite his tender years. On entering the University of Moscow in 1859, his first move had been to set up a clandestine printing press and publish works by Herzen, Ogarev, Feuerbach (
The Essence of Christianity
), and Büchner (
Force and Matter
). Making no secret of his radical sympathies, he attempted to organize peasant resistance to the terms of the liberation during the summer of 1861, and he was arrested after proclaiming his revolutionary ideas in a letter intercepted by the secret police. All the same, Zaichnevsky enjoyed the same astonishingly lax conditions of imprisonment in Moscow as had been accorded the Petersburg students. Friends could bring books, magazines, and newspapers (some of them illegal) to keep him in touch with the political scene. Zaichnevsky wrote the proclamation in his cell with the help of a small group of friends, all regular visitors, who had taken part in Moscow student demonstrations
in the autumn of 1861. The manuscript, smuggled out with the help of a guard, was printed by Zaichnevsky’s comrades on their own press, and they made Petersburg the center of distribution so as to divert attention from the real source.

Young Russia
minced no words in declaring its aims, and exhibited none of the reluctance to go to extremes still discernible in the other two proclamations. It demanded “a revolution, a bloody and pitiless revolution, a revolution which must change everything down to the very roots, utterly overthrowing all the foundations of present society and bringing about the ruin of all who support the present order.”
¹⁶
This would mean the total transformation of a system in which “a small number of people who own capital control the fate of the rest” and in which, consequently, “everything is false, everything is stupid, from religion . . . to the family.”
¹⁷
Accordingly, the leaflet demanded the total emancipation of women, the abolition of marriage (as “immoral”), the suppression of the family (as a barrier to the full development of the individual), the dissolution of convents and monasteries (as “centers of debauchery”), and the secularization of all church property.
¹⁸

The ultimate objective of
Young Russia
was a democratic republic, but Zaichnevsky was less interested in the future than in the immediate task of preparing the revolution, which, like so many others, he was convinced was on the point of breaking out because of the peasant’s discontent with the terms of liberation. The first step was thus to attack all those, such as Herzen and the authors of
The Great Russian
, who advocated some sort of liberal compromise, and in his critical analysis of the policy advocated by Herzen in
The Bell
Zaichnevsky joins forces with the polemic against the superfluous men of the 1840s initiated by Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. All thought of compromise is rejected because,
Young Russia
declares, revolutions in the past had failed through lack of determination, and “we will go further, not only than the poor revolutionaries of 1848, but also than the great terrorists of the 1790s [in France].”
¹⁹
The ultimate aim, of course, was to give power to the people, who would eventually rule themselves in a perfect democratic fashion, but such a transfer of sovereignty could occur only after the triumph of the revolution. Till then, it would be necessary to place all power in the hands of a revolutionary dictatorship, which would “stop at nothing” to establish “new foundations of society and the economy.”
²⁰
Well-read in the history of revolutions, Zaichnevsky himself gave the appropriate label to his own political outlook: Russian Jacobinism.

Such generalities pale into insignificance, however, beside the description of what might occur if the victorious revolution encountered any resistance. “The day will soon come when we will unfurl the great banner of the future, the red banner. And with a mighty cry of ‘long live the Russian Social and Democratic Republic,’ we will move against the Winter Palace to wipe out all those who dwell there.” Bloodshed would, so far as possible, be restricted to the tsar and his immediate entourage, but if the “whole imperial party” rose in defense of the royal family, then “we will cry ‘To your axes’ and then we will . . . destroy them in the squares, if the cowardly swine dare to go there. We will destroy them in their houses, in the narrow streets of the towns, in the broad avenues of the capital, and in the villages. Remember that, when this happens, anyone who is not with us is against us and an enemy, and that every method is used to destroy the enemy.”
²¹
Such fantasies of mass carnage and extermination, coupled with a direct threat against the royal family, imparted a sinister aura to
Young Russia
that horrified most of its readers and caused Dostoevsky to despair of the mental capacities of its authors.

A vivid sense of the first reactions caused by
Young Russia
may be given in Dostoevsky’s own words, written eleven years after he found a copy wedged into the door handle of his apartment: “And here I, who heart and soul disagreed with these people, and with the meaning of their movement—I became suddenly vexed and almost ashamed, as it were, of their incompetence: ‘Why is everything so stupid and ignorant about them?’ ” He found himself greatly upset “by the educational, mental level, and the lack of even a minimal comprehension of reality—this, to me, was terribly oppressive” (21: 25). While such a proclamation might once have seem justified as a desperate last resort in a period of black reaction, its bold disclosure at the present time,
after
the liberation of the serfs, could only have struck Dostoevsky as catastrophic. Its effect on society, as he must have instantly foreseen, would inevitably be to precipitate a general revulsion against the radicals and
all
their objectives.