Dostoevsky (172 page)

The document informs the tsar—as if he did not already know it!—that, among the vast majority of fervent and devoted servants of the fatherland, there had long since appeared, in “the cultural [
intelligentny
] stratum of society,” people “not believing in either the Russian people or its truth, nor even in God.”
On the heels of such people came “impatient destroyers, ignorant even in their convictions . . . sincere evildoers, proclaiming the idea of total destruction and anarchy” but genuinely believing that whatever remained after destruction had done its work would be preferable to what exists. Now “the young Russian energies, alas, so sincerely deluding themselves, have at last fallen under the power of dark, underground forces, under the power of enemies of the Russian land and consequently of all Christendom.” These were the forces that, “with unexampled audacity,” not long ago “committed unheard-of evil deeds in our country, which caused shudders of outrage in our upright and mighty people and in the entire world.” (Whether it was diplomatic to have referred, even obliquely, to the Winter Palace explosion or to the earlier attempts on the tsar’s life may well be questioned.)

Nor does Dostoevsky denounce the perpetrators of these outrages with any of the condemnatory epithets that might have been expected. For him they are “young Russian energies” whose motives, whatever their “evil deeds,” could hardly be considered
entirely
criminal or wicked because they had been misguided in their
sincerity
and gone astray. The nefariousness of their actions begins to dissolve when these young people are viewed as the products of the entire course of Russian social-cultural development, the end result of what had begun with those who did not believe in the Russian people, in its truth, and in God (presumably the generation of the 1840s). Dostoevsky assures the tsar that the Slavic Benevolent Society “stands, so far as their opinions are concerned, firmly opposed—both to the faintheartedness of so many fathers, and the wild madness of their children,
who believe in villainy and sincerely bow down before it
.” This repeated emphasis on the “sincerity” of the radicals was hardly the language that the tsar was accustomed to hear about those attempting to destroy him and his regime.

Dostoevsky highlights the contrasting convictions held by the Slavic Benevolent Society—but of course voicing his own views—concerning the relations between the tsar and his people. This relation is purely patriarchal and derives from “the ancient truth, which from time immemorial has penetrated into the soul of the Russian people: that their Tsar is also their father, and that children always will come to their father without fear so that he hears from them, with love, of their needs and wishes; that the children love their father and the father trusts their love; and that the relation of the Russian people to their Tsar-Father is lovingly free and without fear, not lifelessly formal and contractual.” This last phrase is a thrust at the idea of “crowning the edifice” by a Western-style constitution. Rumors had been widely circulating that, to celebrate the anniversary, the granting of such a constitution would be announced on that day.

Dostoevsky knew that this familial image of the relation between the tsar and his people was more a longed-for ideal than a reality. Whatever the people might
feel about their Tsar-Father, their approach to him, if it took place at all, could occur only by means of a tightly controlled ritual, and was hardly one of free and easy access. By twice emphasizing the importance of being able to appeal to the tsar “without fear,” he distinctly implies the absence of such a desirable state of affairs. Indeed, in a notebook entry made during the last year of his life, he states his view: “I am a servant of the Tsar like Pushkin, because his children, the people, do not disdain to be servants of the Tsar. They would be his servants even more when he actually believes that the people are his children. Something that, for a very long time, he has not believed.”
⁶

Like the radicals who had called for a constituent assembly, Dostoevsky was also admonishing the tsar to consult the people. Moreover, instead of emphasizing the immutability of the reign that he was presumably glorifying, he looks forward (though of course discreetly) to its eventual modification in the public interest. For it is on the “unshakable” foundation of this father-child relation, he affirms, “that perhaps may be accomplished and completed the structure of every future transformation of our state, to the extent that these will be recognized as necessary.” He too looked forward to a “crowning of the edifice,” but not by the granting of a constitution; what he desired was the distribution of more land to the peasantry by the will of the tsar.

This document, presented to the tsar on February 19 by the minister of the interior, L. S. Makov, was read carefully by its recipient, who perhaps understood its underlying drift more clearly than its official sponsors. For the tsar remarked to his minister (his words were reported to Anna after Dostoevsky’s death), “I never suspected the Slavic Benevolent Society of solidarity with the Nihilists.”
⁷
The tsar could only have been speaking ironically, which means he had grasped those aspects of the address betraying not only a latent sympathy with the
sincere
radicals but also a desire that the tsar allow the people to make their wishes known “without fear.”

Dostoevsky visited Suvorin on the same day his address was given to the tsar, and, in a two-hour conversation, the journalist found Dostoevsky in an extremely good mood, “very lively” and full of hope about a change for the better under Loris-Melikov. “You will see,” he told Suvorin, “something new is beginning. I’m not a prophet, but you’ll see. Now everything looks different.”
⁸

On the day following the tsar’s anniversary celebration, an extraordinary conversation took place between Dostoevsky and Suvorin. The former had just suffered another epileptic attack, and Suvorin found him in a gloomy and depressed
state of mind. The talk turned to the wave of political crimes, and to the explosion in the Winter Palace. “Deliberating on these events,” Suvorin recalled, “Dostoevsky dwelt on the strange relation of society to these crimes. Society sympathized with them, as it were, or, closer to the truth, did not really know what to think about them.” Then he invented a dramatic situation, as he had so often done for the characters in his novels, in which he himself would be confronted with having to choose a course of action that would define his moral attitude. What if he and Surovin had overheard a conversation between two terrorists about imminent plans to blow up the Winter Palace. Would they turn to the police to arrest the conspirators?. When Surovin replied in the negative, Dostoevsky concurred, “Nor would I. . . . Why? . . . I turned over all the reasons that would cause me to do it. Well-founded reasons . . . then considered all the reasons that would hold me back. These reasons are—simply insignificant. Simply the fear of being reputed to be an informer.”
⁹

Nothing shows more glaringly the moral discredit into which the tsarist regime had fallen by this time and the torturing moral-political dilemma that confronted all thinking Russians as they observed from the sidelines the attempts to kill the Tsar-Father. No wonder that every installment of
The Brothers Karamazov
was snapped up and read with such passionate intensity, as if the literate classes were hoping the novel would help them find some answer to their quandary. There can be no doubt, in any case, that Dostoevsky felt the dilemma he and Suvorin were contemplating to have the most intimate connection with the thematics of the novel. For it was at the conclusion of this dialogue, and under its stimulation, that he outlined for his listener one of the possible continuations envisaged for his second volume. In this version, Alyosha Karamazov prepared himself “to pass through the monastery and become a revolutionary. He would commit a political crime. He would be executed. He would have searched for truth, and in these searches, naturally, he would have become a revolutionary.”
¹⁰
Such words surely indicate the affinity between his morally positive hero Alyosha and the radicals. They also help us to understand why, despite all the “solid” reasons he could muster, Dostoevsky flinched at the prospect of turning the terrorists over to the police.

On the very day of this conversation, an attempt was made on the life of Loris-Melikov. A young Jewish radical, Ippolit Mlodetsky, fired at the newly appointed plenipotentiary point-blank but missed. Mlodetsky was captured, tried by court-martial, and condemned to death. Soon afterward, Suvorin writes that “the attempt on the life of Count Loris-Melikov agitated Dostoevsky, [who] was afraid of a reaction.” “God forbid that we turn back to the old road,” he is
quoted as having said. Suvorin also notes that “during the period of our political crimes he was in terrible fear of a massacre, a massacre of the educated class by the people, who would surge up as the avengers. ‘You haven’t seen what I saw,’ he would say, ‘you don’t know what the people are capable of when they are enraged. I have seen terrible, terrible instances.’ ”
¹¹

The public hanging of Mlodetsky took place on February 22, at the same Semenovsky Square where, thirty years before, Dostoevsky had stood as a condemned man. Now he took his place in the crowd of onlookers, which he estimated to be about fifty thousand. He was still under the unhappy effect of the execution two days later when visited by Countess A. I. Tolstaya, who describes him in a letter to her daughter Ekaterina Yunge as “disturbed, sickly, terribly pale”; knowing him quite well, she attributes his condition to the Mlodetsky hanging.
¹²
To cheer him up, she asked Anna to read a laudatory letter from Mme Yunge containing perceptive remarks about the published portions of
The Brothers Karamazov
. “Involuntarily,” she tells her mother, “you compare Dostoevsky with European novelists—I pick only the best of them—the French: Zola, Goncourts, Daudet—they are all honorable, desire improvement; but, my God! how they paddle in shallow water! But he . . . [is] also a . . . realist, a precise investigator, a psychologist, an idealist, a philosopher.”
¹³

In conclusion, expressing a sentiment aroused in many others as well, she writes that, after reading about the suffering of the children and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, she was unable to continue and felt a desire “to make her confession before [Dostoevsky] and hear from him some sort of necessary, helpful . . . word.”
¹⁴
As Dostoevsky listened to the young woman’s encomium, his face gradually “lit up, acquired some living color, his eyes sparkled with satisfaction, often with tears. . . . It seemed that he suddenly became younger.” He asked the countess to convey his thanks for such a comprehension of his novel, which “nobody has yet read so thoughtfully.”
¹⁵

The letter from Ekaterina Yunge to her mother was followed by another addressed to him directly. A month later he replied, complaining that he had wished to answer her perceptive missives sooner, but “honest to God, my life goes on at such a disorderly boil and even in such a bustle that I rarely belong to myself.” Dostoevsky knew that Mme Yunge was a painter and (from her mother) that she was personally unhappy, “living in solitude and embittering [her] soul with recollections.” He urges her to have recourse “to a single medicine: art and creative work.” She had described for Dostoevsky the troubling “duality” that
she felt in her personality, and his reassuring comments on this problem touch on one of the major leitmotifs of his own work. Such a personality trait, he tells her, “is peculiar to human nature in general,” but not everyone suffers from it to the same degree as Mme Yunge—or himself. “That’s precisely why you are so kindred to me, because that
split
in you is exactly the same as my own and has been so all my life. It’s a great torment, but at the same time a great delight too. It’s a powerful consciousness, a need for self-evaluation, and the presence in your nature of the need for moral obligation toward yourself and toward humanity. That’s what that duality means.”
¹⁶

Such words offer insight into his psyche, and also into the
moral
significance of all the so-called “schizophrenic” characters that he portrays. “If you were less developed in intellect,” he writes, “if you were limited, you would be less conscience-stricken and there wouldn’t be that duality. On the contrary, very great vanity would result. But the duality is nevertheless a great torment.” The positive moral value assigned to “suffering” in Dostoevsky’s work is always such an inner wrestling with the self; and the only source of comfort is to turn to Christ. As he advises Mme Yunge, “If you believe (or very much want to believe), then give yourself over to Him completely and the torment from that split will be greatly assuaged and you will receive an emotionally spiritual answer, and that’s the main thing.”
¹⁷