Dostoevsky (14 page)

How thoroughly Dostoevsky assimilated the values of this Romantic phase of Russian culture may be judged from his letter to Mikhail a year later. “One had only to look at [Shidlovsky] to see what he was: a martyr! He had become thin; his cheeks sunken; his sparkling eyes dry and burning; the moral beauty of his face heightened as the physical declined. He was suffering, cruelly suffering. My God, how he loved the young girl. . . . She had married someone else. Without this love he would not have been this priest of poetry, pure, noble, disinterested. . . . [H]e was a marvelous, exalted being, the true sketch of man as Shakespeare and Schiller have shown him; but he was just then on the point of falling into the dark madness of Byronic characters.”
⁹
This last phrase probably alludes to Schidlovsky’s struggle against the temptation of suicide.

Dostoevsky’s wide-eyed hero worship is touchingly naïve in its expression, but what he saw in Shidlovsky was the living embodiment of the great Romantic conflict between man and his destiny by which his imagination had now become ignited. Shidlovsky brought him face-to-face with man as “a marvelous, exalted being,” just as Dostoevsky had learned to apprehend him in Shakespeare and Schiller; no poring over texts could have conveyed with such vital immediacy the heights and depths of the Romantic experience. The supreme nobility of a
hopeless (and disinterested
because
hopeless) passion, the spiritual value of suffering for an unattainable ideal, the role of the poet as self-sacrificing “priest” of this Romantic dispensation, proclaiming his faith and his love of God in the midst of his travails—all this Dostoevsky now accepts as the very acme of sublimity.

M. H. Abrams has sharpened our awareness of how the “characteristic concepts and patterns of Romantic philosophy and literature are a displaced and reconstituted theology” and represent a return to Christian fashions of feeling.
¹⁰
“A conspicuous Romantic tendency, after the rationalism and decorum of the Enlightenment,” he writes, “was a reversion to the stark drama and suprarational mysteries of the Christian story and doctrines and to the violent conflicts and abrupt reversals of the Christian inner life, turning on extremes of destruction and creation, hell and heaven, exile and reunion, death and rebirth, dejection and joy, paradise lost and paradise regained.”
¹¹
The Romantic values that Dostoevsky assimilated from Shidlovsky were thus a recasting, in early nineteenth-century terms, of the same religious agitations and questionings that had stirred him profoundly as a young boy in the book of Job. And here we can locate an even deeper reason, besides the ones already mentioned, for the importance that Dostoevsky assigned to Shidlovsky in his life: Shidlovsky’s primary role was to have aided Dostoevsky in making the transition between his childhood faith and its sophisticated modern equivalents. No wonder Dostoevsky was everlastingly grateful to the man who had performed this crucial task!

Dostoevsky did not have to suffer any agonizing reevaluation of his old beliefs in adapting himself to the new world of Romantic culture that he was so eager to assimilate. Nor should one underestimate the future influence of Shidlovsky’s living demonstration that intense religious commitment could be combined with a frank confession of the torments of doubt; genuine faith for Dostoevsky would never afterward be confused with a tranquil acceptance of dogma. Dostoevsky, it is true, soon left this Romantic phase behind, and often later parodied and satirized various types of Romantic egoism. But the Romantic dissatisfaction with the limits of earthly life and, in particular, its positive valuation of moral suffering always remained a feature of his own worldview.

Russian culture in the mid-1830s—during the period of Dostoevsky’s most receptive adolescence—was in a period of transition between the predominant influence of German Romantic literature and Idealist philosophy, on the one hand, and the beginning of a turn toward that of French social Romanticism (which included a good deal of what came to be called social Realism or, in Russia,
Naturalism), on the other. The generation of the 1820s had grown up in a time of great political turmoil and took a strong interest in social and political matters. As every reader of
Evgeny Onegin
will recall, the St. Petersburg dandy of the time considered an acquaintance with the doctrines of Adam Smith an indispensable part of his mental wardrobe.
¹²
The shock administered to Russian society by the Decembrist uprising and its sternly repressive aftermath, however, turned the thoughts of the next generation into other channels. The seeds of German Romantic influence had already been well planted before 1825, and they blossomed luxuriously in the sternly nonpolitical hothouse climate fostered by Nicholas I.

As a result, concern with the practical affairs of man and society was now scornfully rejected as unworthy of the true dignity of the human spirit. Only by striving to unriddle the secrets of the Absolute could man remain faithful to the high calling revealed to him by his own self-consciousness. Art and Idealist metaphysics replaced all other areas of life as the focus of cultural interest. Only one publication—Polevoy’s
The Moscow Telegraph
—stood out against this current and strove, particularly after the French revolution of 1830, to put in a good word for the strong social and Socialist orientation of much of the new French literature. But Polevoy’s own work as a novelist reveals the hybrid amalgam of influences so typical of the mid-1830s: his main emphasis is on the eternal disparity between the dreams of imagination and the limits of the real. Dostoevsky came to intellectual maturity during the mid-1830s, and he was profoundly affected by the disparate mixture of cultural tendencies prevalent in these years.

Dostoevsky’s portrait of Shidlovsky is only one of the numerous passages in his letters in which we can observe him busily assimilating the tenets of what may be called metaphysical Romanticism, with its strong emphasis on man’s relation to a world of supernatural or transcendental forces. During the summer of 1838, as Dostoevsky proudly informs Mikhail, he read “all of Hoffmann in Russian and in German (
Kater Murr
has not been translated),” as well as “the
Faust
of Goethe and his shorter poems.”
¹³
This was exactly the moment when the young critic Belinsky was telling his friends that Hoffmann was as great as Shakespeare. Another young critic, P. V. Annenkov, whose reminiscences provide a penetrating and insightful portrait of this period, recalled that “the fantastic world of Hoffmann’s stories seemed . . . a particle of revelation or disclosure of the omnific Absolute Idea.”
¹⁴
It is again indicative of this era of cultural
fluctuation that even Herzen, destined to become one of Russia’s most influential social-political voices, and who had already come under the influence of Saint-Simonism, should have made his début as a writer in 1837 with a celebration of the metaphysical Romanticism of Hoffmann. Dostoevsky was thus in step with the time in his reading and catching up rapidly with the latest taste.

Dostoevsky probably learned a good deal from Hoffmann’s genius for depicting pathological emotional states and subconscious criminal impulses, as well as for creating a unique poetic atmosphere—a blend of the realistically trivial with a richly imaginative and fantastic dream world. Many years later, in comparing Hoffmann with Poe, Dostoevsky expressed a preference for the German over what he considered the too practical and too down-to-earth American. Poe, he said, confined his fantasy only to the framework of his stories; once given the situation, everything else is presented with startling exactitude and verisimilitude. Hoffmann, on the other hand, “personifies the forces of nature in images,” allows the supernatural to intrude overtly, and “even sometimes seeks his ideal outside the confines of the earthly.” This, in Dostoevsky’s view, makes Hoffmann “immeasurably superior to Poe as a poet” (13: 524). Despite this preference, Dostoevsky’s own work is closer to Poe than to Hoffmann: he too has an uncanny ability to visualize and dramatize the extraordinary within the conventions of realism, and without any (overt) supernatural intrusion.

Dostoevsky’s tendency now, whenever he wishes to describe his inner life, is to employ the categories of Romantic metaphysics—for example, he remarks in a letter to Mikhail on being a “foreign presence” in the academy, and on the world as a “purgatory of celestial spirits” (a phrase with a very Schillerian ring). As his letter continues, his mood of depression is replaced by one of stormy rebellion: “But just to see the harsh covering under which the universe languishes, to know that one explosion of the will is enough to shatter it and to fuse with the eternal, to know and to remain like the lowliest of mortals . . . that’s terrible! How cowardly man is! Hamlet! Hamlet!”
¹⁵
Hamlet’s failure becomes a sign of man’s degradation: humanity is not strong enough to live up to its own exalted self-awareness.

Time and again, in leafing through Dostoevsky’s letters, one sees how well-schooled he had become in this Romantic proclivity for casting his personal problems into cosmic terms. A passage in another letter is important as the first indication of Dostoevsky’s acceptance of a philosophical irrationalism whose roots are to be found in the widespread vogue of Schelling in Russia. Mikhail had written to his brother that “to
know
more, one must
feel
less.” Feodor’s answer is a vehement assertion to the contrary. “What do you mean by the word
to know
?” he asked belligerently. “To know nature, the soul, god, love. . . . These
are known by the heart, not the mind.” Dostoevsky argues that thought cannot unriddle the mystery of creation because “mind is a material faculty,” and as such is not in touch with transcendental truth. “Mind is an instrument, a machine, moved by the fire of the soul.” It is the soul (Dostoevsky also uses the word “heart”) that is the true medium for attaining the highest knowledge, for “if the goal of knowledge is love and nature, this opens up a clear field for
the heart
.” Poetry is thus just as much a medium of knowledge as philosophy, because “the poet, in the transport of inspiration, unriddles God.”
¹⁶

If, along with these quotations, we recall Dostoevsky’s absorption of the works of Schiller in communion with Berezhetsky, we can see how strongly he came under the influence of metaphysical Romanticism. And—from important motifs of the later Dostoevsky—it is clear how deep and longlasting this influence was to remain. It will require his long years of hardship and suffering, and the extraordinary experiences he was forced to undergo, before Dostoevsky would be able to transform these influences into the life-tempered genuineness of his tragic art. Dostoevsky’s accusation of cowardice leveled against Hamlet will one day be critically recast in Raskolnikov’s frenzied self-accusations over his inability to be a “Napoleon” and inwardly remaining one of “the lowliest of mortals.” Nor would Dostoevsky forget the idea of suicide—of an “explosion of the will”—as a supreme gesture of metaphysical defiance when he creates the character of Kirillov in
Demons
. Despite his growing affinity for the new French social Romanticism, metaphysical Romanticism retained its significance for Dostoevsky because it was never spiritually rejected or overcome as a whole. It opened his sensibility to the early nineteenth-century forms in which man struggled to express his age-old religious questionings, and it provided some of the paradigms through which he would ultimately affirm his own genius.

Equally important in its effect on Dostoevsky, however, was the competing literary current of French social Romanticism. There is, it must be admitted, a certain artificiality in separating these two Romanticisms from each other too sharply. How, for example, is one to dissociate the metaphysical from the social in such a writer as Schiller? Auerbach has said of one of Schiller’s plays,
Louise Millerin
, that it is “a dagger thrust to the heart of absolutism,”
¹⁷
and the same phrase can well be applied to them all. Another German critic has written that “what Schiller furthered in his creations from
The Robbers
to
Don Carlos
was . . . what the French Revolution translated into fact.”
¹⁸
The inflammatory effect of Schiller on the birth of more than one revolutionary vocation in Russia is
well-known, and if Dostoevsky and Berezhetsky took on themselves the chivalric task of protecting the weak and helpless in the academy, one may be sure that their reading of Schiller had aroused their social conscience. All this being true, however, a distinction can still usefully be drawn between those influences that taught Dostoevsky to view human life primarily in some absolute or transcendental perspective and those that sharpened his awareness of the concrete social issues of his contemporary world.