Dostoevsky (18 page)

There are intriguing resemblances between Sand’s remarkable novel
Spiridion
(a combination of Gothic mystery story and spiritual autobiography) and certain features of
The Brothers Karamazov
.
³⁴
Both are set in a monastery; both involve the transmission of an ancient and semiheretical religious tradition; both stress that true religion should depend only on free moral choice, not on the tyranny of dogma or institutions; both contain as central characters an old and dying monk—the inheritor of this tradition, who is hated by his fellow monks—and an ardent young disciple inspired by his doctrine and his example; both dramatize the struggle between skeptical reason and true faith. In both novels, the struggle is resolved through a mystical vision that restores a selfless love for all of God’s creation and revives belief in the existence of conscience and the immortality of the soul; in each, the dying guardian of the tradition sends his young follower into the world to apply the doctrine of Christian love to the ills of social life.
³⁵
In 1876, Dostoevsky was certain that George Sand had “died a Deist with a firm belief in God and immortal life,” and he pointed out that her Socialism, based as it was “upon the spiritual thirst of mankind for perfection and purity,” coincides with Christianity in its view of human personality as morally responsible.
³⁶
Whether or not such comments were directly inspired by recollections of
Spiridion
, they well illustrate the sort of moral-religious Christian Socialism that George Sand helped to instill in Dostoevsky himself in the early 1840s.

With the collapse of his hopes for
La dernière Aldini
, all of Dostoevsky’s plans for obtaining extra funds by translation went glimmering. Nor was he any more successful with another project that seemed promising—a complete Russian version of Schiller’s plays, with Mikhail as translator and himself as editor and publisher. Mikhail did put
The Robbers
and
Don Carlos
into Russian, and both were published in periodicals, but the expectation of a complete edition, with substantial profits, once again proved a will-o’-the-wisp. The only enterprise of Dostoevsky’s that succeeded was a translation of
Eugénie Grandet
, prompted by Balzac’s triumphal presence in Petersburg in the winter of 1843. Translated over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, it was published in the
Repertoire and Pantheon
in 1844, and this was the manner in which Dostoevsky’s name, prophetically linked to that of Balzac, first appeared in print. By this time he was
already sharing a flat with Grigorovich, who, through his acquaintance with Nekrasov, had begun to gravitate toward the orbit of the Belinsky Circle.

The idea for
Poor Folk
was conceived in the midst of this abundance of literary activity, all prompted by Dostoevsky’s acute awareness of the new literary temper of the times. “I am finishing a novel about the size of
Eugénie Grandet
,” he writes to Mikhail in the early fall of 1844. “A rather original novel. . . . I will give it to the
Notes of the Fatherland
.”
³⁷
Dostoevsky was obviously writing to satisfy the new exigencies for Russian literature laid down by Belinsky; but nothing else is really known about the gestation of the novel, except for a remark that he made while hard at work on the book. “I read like a fiend,” he says to Mikhail in the spring of 1845, just as he was putting the finishing touches to his manuscript, “and reading has a strange effect on me. I reread some book I’ve read before, and it’s as if new strength began to stir in me. I penetrate into everything, I understand with precision, and I myself draw from this the ability to create.”
³⁸

It is thus primarily to literature that we should turn for the “sources” of
Poor Folk
. The title, as well as the style of the diary of the chief female character, Varvara, links her to Karamzin’s sentimental idyll
Poor Liza
, which laments tearfully over the sad fate of a beauteous and virtuous peasant maiden, seduced and betrayed by a weak-willed young aristocrat.
³⁹
Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and Pushkin’s “The Station Master” also played a role in the conception of the work and are referred to in the text. Less visible but perhaps no less crucial was
Eugénie Grandet
, which celebrates the unselfconscious heroism of a plain country girl who proves capable of true moral grandeur. According to Balzac, this obscure family drama was no less cruel and fateful than that of “the princely House of Atreus.”
⁴⁰
Balzac’s example may well have shown Dostoevsky the way to effecting a similar elevation in the human stature of his own humble protagonists.

It is precisely the lofty moral stature of Dosotevsky’s humble and humiliated characters that distinguishes them from Gogol’s brilliant caricatures. Indeed, in a journalistic
feuilleton
written twenty years later, when Dostoevsky views his own literary evolution from the days of his early Romanticism up to his discovery of the theme of his first novel, he makes this very distinction between himself and Gogol. The feuilleton, titled “Petersburg Visions in Verse and Prose,” is
written by Dostoevsky’s fictive alter ego, a “romantic dreamer,” and relates a “vision” he experiences while hurrying home one January evening and pausing on the banks of the Neva. There, his eyes open to “something new, to a completely new world” (13: 158). He begins to see “some strange figures, entirely prosaic, . . . just titular councilors, and yet, at the same time, fantastic titular councilors.” Behind them there was someone “who made faces before me, concealed behind all that fantastic crowd, and pulled some kind of strings or springs and all these puppets moved and laughed and everybody laughed!” Then the narrator catches a glimpse of another story that was no laughing matter—“some titular heart, honorable and pure, moral and devoted to the authorities, and together with him some young girl, humiliated and sorrowing, and all their story tore deeply at my heart” (13: 158–159). This story, of course, is the one that Dostoevsky tells in
Poor Folk
.

The very text of the vision makes clear that Dostoevsky is talking about literature: the new world that swims into his ken is that of the master puppeteer Gogol—this is a discovery of Gogol. But Gogol is the first step; the second is the discovery of the situation of
Poor Folk
and of Dostoevsky’s approach to his characters (“honorable and pure,” “humiliated and sorrowing”). After the “vision,” Gogol’s characters, who normally arouse laughter, are seen in such a way that their story “tears deeply at the heart.”

In another variant of the “vision” used thirty years later in
A Raw Youth
(1875), the narrator imagines Petersburg vanishing into the sky like smoke. He exclaims: “What if this [Petersburg] fog should part and float away? Would not all this rotten and slimy town go with it . . . and the old Finnish marsh be left as before, and in the midst of it . . . a bronze horseman on a panting, overdriven steed?” (8: 116). The image of Petersburg is associated here with Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman,” and the bronze horseman is Peter the Great as cast in the famous statue by Falconet. Pushkin’s protagonist Evgeny, whose fiancée has just been swept away in the flood of 1824 evoked in the poem, shakes his fist at the statue because it is Peter who is responsible for the ruin of Evgeny’s life. But once the bereaved Evgeny commits his impetuous act of
lèse-majesté
, he is so terrified and guilt-stricken that he goes out of his mind, imagining that he hears the ringing hoofs of the bronze horseman pursuing him; and his body is finally washed ashore in a hut on a lonely island devastated by the storm.

Pushkin thus dramatizes the immense power of Petersburg to crush the lives of all those lowly and helpless folk who live in the shadow of its splendors, but, even more important, Pushkin treats the fate of poor Evgeny with sympathy and compassion rather than with the ridicule that Gogol employs for similar types. After the vision, this is exactly the attitude that Dostoevsky himself will adopt toward such characters. Pushkin, in other words, pointed the way for Dostoevsky to overcome his Romanticism without turning into a mere imitator of
Gogol; the vision symbolizes the moment when Dostoevsky became aware of how, by following the example of Pushkin, he could join the new Gogolian trend and affirm his artistic originality at the same time. If, after the vision, Gogol’s characters are seen freshly—and in such a way that their story “tears deeply at the heart”—it is because they are now being viewed through the prism of Pushkin. In short, the “completely new world” that the vision revealed to Dostoevsky was that of his own style of sentimental Naturalism, a synthesis of Gogol, Pushkin—and Dostoevsky.

¹
Pis’ma
, 1: 76; March (February) 24, 1845.

²
A. I. Riesenkampf, “Vospominaniya o F. M. Dostoevskom,”
LN
86 (Moscow, 1973), 325.

³
Ibid., 330.

⁴
Ibid., 331.

⁵
Ibid.

⁶
DVS
, 1: 95.

⁷
Pis’ma
, 1: 65; December 23, 1841.

⁸
Ibid., 4: 450; September 5, 1844.

⁹
It seems likely that Dostoevsky eventually got his thousand rubles. He told the commission investigating the Petrashevsky affair that he renounced his claim to his parents’ estate in 1845 in return for the immediate payment of a sum of money. N. F. Belchikov,
Dostoevsky v protsesse Petrashevtsev
(Moscow, 1971), 123.

¹⁰
Victor Brombert,
Stendhal: Fiction and the Themes of Freedom
(New York, 1968), 29.

¹¹
“The equivalence of love and hate, the one incessantly born from the other . . . is at the center of the Racinian psychology of love.” Paul Bénichou,
Morales du grand siècle
(Paris, 1967), 223.

¹²
Pis’ma
, 1: 58–59; January 1, 1840.

¹³
Ibid., 69; and half of January 1844.

¹⁴
V. G. Belinsky,
Izbrannye filosofskie sochineniya
, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1950), 1: 215.

¹⁵
I. I. Panaev,
Sobranie sochinenii
, 6 vols. (Moscow, 1912), 6: 212.

¹⁶
Cited in Yu. Oksman,
Letopis zhizn’ i tvorchestvo V. G. Belinskogo
(Moscow, 1958), 195.

¹⁷
Panaev,
SS
, 6: 273.

¹⁸
V. G. Belinsky,
Selected Philosophical Works
(Moscow, 1948), 159.

¹⁹
Ibid., 164–165.

²⁰
P. V. Annenkov,
The Extraordinary Decade
, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 112.

²¹
The best-known names of the Pléiade were Panaev himself and K. D. Kavelin. Between 1843 and 1848, it blossomed to include Nekrasov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Herzen and Ogarev were also occasional participants when they came to Petersburg.

²²
See
N. V. Gogol v Russkoi kritike
(Moscow, 1953), 122.

²³
Annenkov,
Decade
, 112.

²⁴
Belinsky,
IFS
, 1: 432.

²⁵
A citation from
Dead Souls
. Belinsky,
Works
, 192–193.

²⁶
DVS
, 1: 129.

²⁷
D. V. Grigorovich,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
, 12 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1896), 12: 266.

²⁸
DVS
, 1: 114.

²⁹
Belinsky,
Works
, 323.

³⁰
Harold March,
Frédéric Soulié
(New Haven, 1931), 177.

³¹
George Sand,
The Last of the Aldinis
, trans. George Burnham Ives (Philadelphia, 1900), 359–360.

³²
DW
(June 1876), 346.

³³
Cited in M. Polyakov,
Vissarion Belinsky
(Moscow, 1960), 325.

³⁴
Dostoevsky read
L’Uscoque
, which was published in the
Revue des Deux Mondes
in 1838.
Spiridion
began to appear in the same publication the same year, and the eminently respectable journal was available in the French library to which Dostoevsky was a subscriber.

³⁵
DVS
, 1: 112–113.

³⁶
DW
(June 1876), 349.

³⁷
Pis’ma
, 1: 73; September 30, 1844.

³⁸
Ibid., 76; March (February) 24, 1845.

³⁹
This view has been advanced by K. K. Istomin and A. I. Bem. For further discussion, see Bem’s suggestive article, “Pervye shagi Dostoevskogo,”
Slavia
12 (1933–1934), 134–161.