Dostoevsky (77 page)

If what absorbed Dostoevsky in Paris was the stifling sense of bourgeois order and propriety, what overwhelmed him in London was the clamorous vitality of the city in all the nakedness of its clashing discords: “Even externally, what a contrast with Paris! This city day and night going about its business, enormous as the ocean, with the roaring and rumbling of machines, the railroad line constructed above the houses (and soon underneath the houses), that boldness in enterprise, this apparent disorder which is, in essence, a bourgeois order to the highest degree, this polluted Thames, this air filled with coal dust; these magnificent parks and squares and those terrifying streets of a section like Whitechapel, with its half-naked, wild and starving population. The City with its millions and the commerce of the universe, the Crystal Palace, the World’s Fair” (5: 69).

For a socially conscious Russian, London was the capital city of the classic land of the dispossessed proletariat, and Dostoevsky’s attention was riveted by this aspect of lower-class life. Someone had described to him (and who could it have been if not the London resident Herzen?) how every Saturday night a half-million workers, with their wives and children, swarmed through the downtown streets to celebrate the beginning of their one day of leisure: “All of them bring their weekly savings, what they have earned by hard labor and amidst curses.” Everything remains open, all the butcher shops and the eating places continue to do business, and night is transformed into day as the streets are lit by powerful gas lamps: “It is as if a ball had been organized for these white negroes. The crowd pushes into the open taverns and in the streets. They eat and drink. The beer halls are decorated like palaces. Everybody is drunk, but without gaiety, with a sad drunkenness, sullen, gloomy, strangely silent. Only sometimes an exchange of insults and a bloody quarrel breaks the suspicious silence, which fills one with melancholy. Everyone hurries to get dead drunk as quickly as possible, so as to lose consciousness.” Dostoevsky wandered among such a crowd at two o’clock one Saturday night, and, he says, “the impression of what I had seen tormented me for three whole days” (5: 70–71).

On another evening he strolled among the thousands of prostitutes plying their trade in the Haymarket; and he marveled both at the luxuriousness of the cafés, where accommodations could be rented for the night, and at the attractiveness of some of the women. He saw several that had “faces truly fit for a keepsake” (5: 71–72). Dostoevsky was accosted not only by prostitutes but also by women engaged in the charitable labor of trying to redeem these lost souls.
Their black dresses suggest some early volunteers of the Salvation Army, which formally organized three years later, but Dostoevsky seized the opportunity to nourish his anti-Catholic prejudices. “It is a subtle and well-thought-out propaganda,” he writes. “The Catholic priest himself searches out some miserable worker’s family. . . . He feeds them all, gives them clothes, provides heating, looks after the sick, buys medicine, becomes the friend of the family, and finally converts them all to Catholicism” (5: 73). The idea of Roman Catholicism has already become identified for Dostoevsky with that of a betrayal of the true spirit of the Christian faith, which substitutes for Christ’s message of charity and love the temptation of worldly goods and comforts.

The most important event of Dostoevsky’s stay in London was his meeting with Herzen, whom he probably visited several times during the eight or so days of his English sojourn. Herzen’s masterly
On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia
(1851) had listed Dostoevsky among “the most noble and outstanding” people who had been condemned to Siberia for their political idealism.
Poor Folk
was singled out as evidence of the Socialist turn taken by Russian literature during the 1840s, and more recently Herzen had exhibited the liveliest interest in
House of the Dead
. On the pamphlet
Young Russia
, the two men also saw eye-to-eye. In an article printed in the July 15 issue of
The Bell
, just a few days after Dostoevsky’s first visit, Herzen, sounding for all the world like a
pochvennik
, writes of the pamphlet’s authors, “their fearless logic is one of the most characteristic traits of the Russian genius
estranged from the people
. . . . As a result of the slavery in which we lived, the alienation from ourselves, our break with the people, our impotence to act, there remained for us a painful consolation . . .—the nakedness of our negation, our logical ruthlessness, and it was with some sort of joy that we pronounced those final,
extreme
words which the lips of our teachers have barely whispered, turning white as they did so and looking around uneasily.”
²⁵

Dostoevsky was a great admirer of Herzen’s brilliant part essay, part dialogue,
From the Other Shore
, and he praised it to its author. Indeed, few others writings of Herzen would have been as close to Dostoevsky’s heart as this bitter indictment of the illusions of Utopian Socialism, this denunciation of European civilization as hidebound to the social-political forms of the past and incapable of going beyond their limits, this torrent of scorn poured on the radical European intelligentsia for imagining that the masses would really pay attention to their high-flown lucubrations.

Herzen had then developed his theory of Russian Socialism, in which his disillusionment with the European working class and its leaders gave way to a hope
for the future founded on the traditional egalitarian Socialism of the Russian peasant and his native
obshchina
. Would not Dostoevsky have indicated his agreement with Herzen on
this
point—and to such a degree that the skeptical Herzen even recoiled somewhat from the fervency of Dostoevsky’s words? Such would seem to be the sense of Herzen’s own reference to their conversation in a letter to Ogarev, whom Dostoevsky had probably met a day or so earlier. “Dostoevsky was here yesterday—he is a naïve, not entirely lucid, but very nice person,” he writes. “He believes with enthusiasm in the Russian people.”
²⁶

Dostoevsky must surely have been aware that in visiting Herzen, he was taking a step that might place him in danger. The Third Section kept a sharp eye on the activities of the Herzen household, and Chernyshevsky had been arrested after spies reported that Herzen was imprudently offering to print
The Contemporary
in London. Dostoevsky’s presence did not escape the vigilant operatives who kept Herzen under surveillance, and information was sent back to Russia that in London, Dostoevsky “had struck up a friendship with the exiles Herzen and Bakunin.”
²⁷
The flamboyant Bakunin, then also living in London, had recently made a sensational escape from Siberian exile by way of the United States.

L. P. Grossman has argued that Bakunin was the direct prototype for Stavrogin in
Demons
, and a good deal of ink has been spilled over the question of their actual meeting.
²⁸
Dostoevsky’s imagination, however, though it certainly worked from prototypes, invariably fused all sorts of suggestions into a representative image; he never took only a single personage as an exclusive source of inspiration. Whether the two men ever met thus becomes a minor question so far as Dostoevsky the artist is concerned, though it may well have occurred because Bakunin so assiduously attended Herzen’s Sunday afternoon receptions. In any event, Dostoevsky’s name was placed on the list of those persons who visited Herzen not simply out of curiosity but because they sympathized “more or less with his criminal intentions.”
²⁹
A special command was issued to search his luggage on his way home.

Dostoevsky and Strakhov joined forces in Geneva in late July and traveled together through Switzerland and the north of Italy by way of Turin, Geneva, and Livorno to Florence. In Florence they spent a week in a modest
pensione
on the
Via Tornebuoni. The two Russians were inseparable, and Strakhov has left an engaging image of Dostoevsky in his unaccustomed role as tourist: “all his attention was focused on people, on grasping their nature and character, and on the general impression of life going on around him in the streets.”
³⁰
This account agrees with Dostoevsky’s own remarks in
Winter Notes
, but one wonders whether he was as little interested in the Uffizi as Strakhov pretends (casting himself, of course, in the role of civilized art lover). The two men read Hugo’s
Les misérables
(just then coming out), with Dostoevsky eagerly buying volume after volume and passing them on to Strakhov. Most of all they walked and talked, and Strakhov paints an idyllic image of these leisurely conversations.

His amicable portrait, however, has been challenged by an unfinished draft of an article entitled “Observations” found in the Strakhov archives, which uncovers some of the tensions that eventually led Strakhov, shortly after Dostoevsky’s death, to denounce his erstwhile friend in a scurrilous letter to Tolstoy. Dedicated to Dostoevsky, it seems to have been composed in Florence or shortly thereafter, and it begins by recalling one of those dialogues that its author later depicted with such accents of nostalgia. “In one of our walks through Florence,” he writes, “you declared to me very heatedly that there was in the tendency of my thought a defect that you hated, despised, and would persecute until your dying day. Then we shook hands firmly and parted.”
³¹
So much for the cameo of unruffled concord that Strakhov later offered to a gullible world!

Why should Dostoevsky have reacted so heatedly and insultingly? Strakhov had always been in favor of a hard line with the radicals, and his remarks seem to refer to this position. No one, he argued, should be permitted to escape the logical consequences of his convictions and actions; no excuses should be made on the ground that people did not understand the full implications of their own ideas. “You found unbearable and repugnant,” writes Strakhov, “that I often led our reasoning to the conclusion which, in the simplest fashion, can be expressed as: ‘but really, it is impossible that 2 plus 2 does not equal 4.’ ”
³²

Strakhov was thus insisting that the radicals be made to assume the full onus of their beliefs. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, did not as yet wish to pin them against the wall, and he had replied to Strakhov that their seeming inconsistency should be given a more charitable interpretation: “obviously the people who say
2 plus 2 does not equal 4
do not at all intend to say this, but, without question, think and wish to express something else.”
³³
For Dostoevsky, illogicality is not a proof of error but the indication of a conflict between what is said and what is actually meant; the error is a clue to something hidden and concealed under the
idea that must be understood as its
real
meaning. These words reveal the basis on which, so far, Dostoevsky had refused to condemn the radicals in toto, no matter how hostile he was to their expressed ideas. For underneath these he continued to sense a desire for the good that should be recognized and acknowledged.

Another passage in Strakhov’s allusive text takes a sudden leap from the realm of social politics to that of the ultimate basis of morality. “Is man really good?” Strakhov asks abruptly. “Are we really able boldly to deny his rottenness?” His answer to this question is emphatically negative, and he supports his conclusion by an appeal to the testimony of the Christian faith: “The ideal of the perfect man, shown us by Christianity, is not dead and cannot die in our souls; it has grown together with it forever. And thus, when the picture of contemporary humanity is unrolled before us and we are asked: Is man good? we immediately find in ourselves the decisive answer: ‘No, rotten to the core!’ ”
³⁴
The fragment contains enough for us to understand why Dostoevsky could have been stirred to such anger and hostility against his presumed “friend.”

Despite a widely held belief to the contrary, Dostoevsky did not share Strakhov’s “Christian” view that man is “rotten to the core” (which represents the opinion only of an extreme Augustinian or Reformation Christianity). Dostoevsky believed that since man, and Russian man in particular, was capable of remorse and repentance, the hope of his redemption should never be abandoned. No doubt Strakhov understood this to be the root cause of Dostoevsky’s refusal to renounce all sympathy with the radicals once and for all, and his response that he “would hate, despise, and persecute” such a cast of mind for the remainder of his days. Strakhov was indeed striking here at Dostoevsky’s deepest pieties, at his fundamental faith in the treasures of Christian love concealed in the soul of the ignorant Russian people; and such a sacrilege Dostoevsky could not forgive.