Dostoevsky (11 page)

3. A government courier on a mission

It is against the background of this lofty moral idealism, so characteristic of the Russian culture of the 1830s, that one must gauge the shock of what then occurred. At a posting station along the road the Dostoevskys saw the whirlwind arrival of a government courier wearing the imposing full uniform of the time, crowned by the white, yellow, and green plumes of a three-cornered hat waving in the wind. The courier, a powerful and red-faced man, rushed into the station to drink a glass of vodka, emerged again rapidly, and leaped into a new troika. No sooner was he installed than he rose to his feet and began to beat the driver, a young peasant, on the back of the neck with his fist. The horses lurched forward as the driver frantically whipped them up, and the troika vanished from sight with the courier’s fist moving mechanically up and down in relentless rhythm as the whip rose and fell in a corresponding tempo.
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At the end of this account Dostoevsky imagines the young peasant, on returning to his village,
beating his wife to revenge his own humiliation. “This sickening picture,” he says, “remained in my memory all my life.”
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These words appeared in 1876, and in the notebooks for
Crime and Punishment
he jots down “My first personal insult, the horse, the courier,”
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thus confirming the primacy of the experience for Dostoevsky and the formative role that he assigns to it in his own self-development. For the courier became nothing less than a symbol of the brutal, oppressive government that he served—a government whose domination over an enslaved peasantry by naked force incited all the violence and harshness of peasant life. “Never was I able to forget the courier, and much that was shameful and cruel in the Russian people I was then inclined for a long while, and as it were involuntarily, to explain in an obviously much too one-sided fashion.”
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With these guarded phrases, Dostoevsky reveals the motivation of his radicalism of the 1840s, when nothing would obsess him more passionately than the issue of serfdom. “This little scene appeared to me, so to speak, as an emblem, as something very graphically demonstrating the link between cause and effect. Here every blow dealt to the animal leaped out of each blow dealt at the man. At the end of the 1840s, in the epoch of my most unrestrained and fervent dreams, it suddenly occurred to me that, if ever I were to found a philanthropic society [that is, radical or Socialist], I would without fail engrave this courier’s troika on the seal of the society as its emblem and sign.”
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Dostoevsky is telling his readers that, in his youth, he had explained the vices of the peasantry solely in social-political terms, solely as a result of the clenched fist crashing down on the back of their necks. He had been convinced that these vices would vanish once the fist had been stayed.

It seems certain that the youth of sixteen had never observed such unimpassioned, systematic, and methodical brutality exercised on a perfectly blameless victim. The “official” nature of the inhumanity in this instance perhaps lit up in a flash the presumptive social source of the evil. And once again we note the capacity of his sensibility to be stirred at its deepest levels by a public and a social matter in which he was not personally involved at all.

Critical clichés persist in viewing the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century as a solipsistic and introspective movement turning its back on the turbulent social-political problems of “real life.” The government of the time had quite a different opinion, as Benedetto Croce has pointed out. “The suffering of the world, the mystery of the universe, the impulse toward the sublime in love and heroism, the grief and despair over a dreamt-of but unattainable beatitude,
the Hamlet-like visits to cemeteries, the romantic pallor, romantic beards, and romantic haircuts—all these and similar things gave evidence of restive spirits. It was expected and feared that they would join conspiratorial sects and rise with arms in their hands the moment they had the chance.”
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The young Dostoevsky was unquestionably a Romantic, but the impressions that he gleaned from literature reinforced and strengthened those offered by life. Dostoevsky would not have been so overcome by the beating of the peasant coachman if he had not read Karamzin and Pushkin, and had not already made his own some of Schiller’s moral ideal of “the beautiful and sublime.”

This shocking episode with the coachman was Dostoevsky’s introduction to St. Petersburg and to all the sordid underside of the resplendent façade of the government in whose service he was about to enter. Indeed, his very first contact with officialdom brought him face-to-face with the hidden corruption that ran through all the institutions of Russian society. On arriving in St. Petersburg, Dr. Dostoevsky deposited his sons in a preparatory school, where the boys studied for their entrance examination into the academy. Even this important patronage, however, did not guarantee success. Mikhail was refused entrance on grounds of “ill health”; Feodor, though passing his exam brilliantly, did not receive one of the vacancies for entrance without payment of the admission fee. This had been promised when Dr. Dostoevsky had made application for his sons, but such places, it turned out, were reserved for those students able to make “gifts” to the examiners. “What rottenness!” Dostoevsky indignantly writes his father. “We, who struggle for every last ruble, have to pay, while others—the sons of rich fathers—are accepted without fee.”
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Luckily, the Kumanins came to the rescue by supplying the required amount. Mikhail was finally admitted to another school of army engineers and was transferred to the Baltic provinces.

From a purely worldly point of view, Dr. Dostoevsky had chosen well for his sons. The Academy of Military Engineers—housed in the imposing Mikhailovsky palace—was considered the finest establishment of its kind in Russia in the 1830s, and places in it were particularly sought because it enjoyed the patronage of Nicholas I. But Dostoevsky’s life in the academy was one long torture, and he always looked back on the decision to send him there as a woeful mistake. The error consisted not only in overlooking the real bent of his interests but also in placing him in a milieu dominated by physical violence, military harshness, and iron discipline rather than by the relaxed democratic camaraderie that Herzen depicts as reigning among his fellow students at the University of Moscow
during the same years. “What examples I saw before me!” Dostoevsky reminisces twenty years later. “I saw children of thirteen already reckoning out their entire lives: where they could attain to what rank, what is more profitable, how to rake in cash (I was in the Engineers), and what was the fastest way to get a cushy, independent command!”
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4. The Academy of Military Engineers

For the young man from Moscow whose head was filled with thoughts of “the beautiful and sublime,” the moral mediocrity of his comrades came as a withering disillusionment. And if he had been outraged by the incident of the government courier, one can well imagine his horror at the savagery of the upper classes toward all those to whom they stood in a position of authority. The memoirs of D. V. Grigorovich give a searing picture of this feature of academy life, and even at a distance of sixty years, such memories brought back “a painful feeling.”
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Merciless tormenting of the lower-classmen was one of the privileges enjoyed by the older students. The authorities closed their eyes to this cruel sport so long as external discipline was maintained, and any protest or resistance could bring on a mass beating that frequently landed the offender in the hospital.

On finding himself thrown into this milieu, Dostoevsky’s first reaction was to feel himself a complete stranger and an outcast. Using the language of the
Romantic literature that he was then absorbing, he writes to Mikhail just six months after his admission: “the atmosphere of [man’s] soul is composed of the union of heaven and earth; what an unnatural child man is; the law of spiritual nature is broken. . . . It seems to me that the world has taken on a negative meaning, and that from a high, refined spirituality there has emerged a satire.”
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Dostoevsky was already beginning to think of human life as an eternal struggle between the material and the spiritual in man’s nature; and he would always continue to regard the world as a “purgatory,” whose trials and tribulations serve the supreme purpose of moral purification.

A younger fellow student whom Dostoevsky befriended, and who later became a noted artist, gives this picture of Feodor: “His uniform hung awkwardly, and his knapsack, shako, rifle—all those looked like some sort of fetters that he was obliged to wear temporarily and which weighed him down.”
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Grigorovich tells us that Dostoevsky “already then exhibited traits of unsociability, stayed to one side, did not participate in diversions, sat and buried himself in books, and sought a place to be alone.”
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A. I. Savelyev, a young officer then on duty in the academy, remarks that “he was very religious, and zealously performed all the obligations of the Orthodox Christian faith. He could be seen with the Bible, Zschokke’s
Die Stunden der Andacht
[a famous collection of devotional essays with a strong emphasis on the necessity of giving Christian love a social application], etc. After the lectures on religion by Father Poluektov, Feodor would converse with him for a long while. All this struck his comrades so much that they dubbed him the monk Photius.”
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Nor did he content himself only with harboring social-Christian ideas in solitude; he tried courageously to put them into practice by opposing some of the abuses of academy life.

Savelyev recalls that Dostoevsky and his friend Ivan Berezhetsky stood out from the run of students by their “compassion for the poor, weak, and unprotected.” They “employed every means to stop this customary violence, just as they tried to protect the watchmen and all those who looked after the services of the school.”
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Physical maltreatment of the teachers of foreign languages, especially Germans, was also a favorite indoor sport at the academy, and this too Dostoevsky fought against, though not always with success.

He was the editor of the lithographed student newspaper—which would indicate a certain amount of public authority and acceptance. And, even though known as solitary, he did have a small circle of like-minded friends, some of whom were destined to play an important role in his life. With Grigorovich he
shared a passionate interest in literature and the arts; with A. N. Beketov, who was to become the center of a “progressive” circle in the 1840s, a deep social concern and moral passion; Berezhetsky, who vanishes from sight except for this brief moment of his friendship with Dostoevsky, may have attracted him by his mixture of humanitarianism, intellectual pretentiousness, and haughty elegance. It is Berezhetsky who is mentioned in all the memoirs as Dostoevsky’s closest friend in the academy. Savelyev pictures them strolling through the ample rooms of the palace and talking of contemporary poetry (Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Vyazemsky) while the rest of the student body were at the regular Tuesday evening dance class or engaged in outdoor sports. Another memoirist depicts them arguing loudly about Schiller, with Dostoevsky running after Berezhetsky in the corridors to drive home the final word.

Writing to Mikhail at the beginning of 1840, Feodor says that, in the preceding year, he had had a friend for whom he had felt “the love of a brother”; “I had a companion at my side, the one creature I loved in that way.” This could only have been Berezhetsky, with whom he communed over the works of Schiller. “I learned Schiller by heart, talked him, dreamed him. . . . Reading Schiller
with him
, I verified
in him
the noble, fiery Don Carlos and Marquis Posa and Mortimer. That friendship brought me so much sorrow and joy! . . . the name of Schiller has become near and dear to me, a kind of magic sound, evoking so many reveries; they are bitter, brother.”
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The temperature of male friendship in early nineteenth-century Russia was extremely high, and a passionate male attachment under the magical aegis of Schiller was a fairly common occurrence in the 1830s.
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What it represented, in this instance, may be deduced from the names of the Schillerian characters whom Dostoevsky believed he saw embodied in his friend—all are young men inspired by high idealism, by love, or by friendship to serve the great social causes of freedom and justice.