Dostoevsky (88 page)
Authors: Joseph Frank
There is some indication, too, that Dostoevsky intended to write a series of episodes with the underground man as central figure, but he never developed the plan beyond the two parts of the existing text of
Notes from Underground
.
9
And just as
Part I
grew out of an article about
What Is To Be Done?
, absorbing along the way some of the material for a rewriting of
The Double
, so
Part II
probably emerged from Dostoevsky’s intention to write a work called
A Confession
(the title had been announced in
Time
at the beginning of 1863 as Dostoevsky’s next contribution). First mentioned in October 1859, this project is described in a letter to Mikhail as “a
confession
—a novel that I wished to write after everything, so to say, I have had to live through myself. . . . I conceived it in
katorga
. . . in painful moments of sorrow and self-criticism.”
10
This confession would have contained a disillusioned contemplation of Dostoevsky’s ideological past in the 1840s. Since this is precisely what we find in
Part II
, we can assume that this scheme was also embodied in
Notes from Underground
, nor would such an amalgamation have been entirely fortuitous. Despite all its coldly calculating terminology of egoism and Utilitarianism, Chernyshevsky’s novel had revived much of the sentimental, idealistic atmosphere of the 1840s and shared its philanthropic reveries of a redeemed and purified humanity. Dostoevsky could thus easily integrate such material from his own past, both ideological and personal, into his new creation, and it is surely no coincidence that the underground man in
Part II
is exactly the same age as Dostoevsky at the time of his success with
Poor Folk
in 1845. Whatever autobiographical elements are contained in this second part, however, all are assimilated into the overriding artistic thrust of the text as a whole.
On March 20, 1864, Dostoevsky wrote to Mikhail that he was following a severe regimen, taking innumerable precautions with his diet, and that his infectious condition was on the mend. Marya Dimitrievna’s sister had also providentially arrived from Petersburg to take charge of the household. “Without her,” he comments, “I don’t know what would have become of us.”
11
Marya Dimitrievna was growing weaker every day, and Dostoevsky was told that her death might occur at any moment; but she continued desperately to cling to life, and was still pathetically making plans for the summer months and choosing her place of residence in future years. The emotional drain of this heart-rending situation must surely have been enormous; but Dostoevsky assures Mikhail that “I have gone back to my work on my novella [
Part II
of
Notes from Underground
]. . . . [I]t’s absolutely necessary that it be successful; it is necessary
for me
. It has an extremely bizarre tone, brutal and violent; it may displease; poetry will have to soften it all through and make it bearable. But I hope that this will get better.”
12
One week later Dostoevsky was sent the first issue of
Epoch
containing
Part I
of
Notes from Underground
, and could scarcely recognize what he saw before him. His conception had been mutilated by the censorship. “It would have been better,” he says, “not to have published the next-to-last chapter at all (where the essential, the very idea of the work is expressed) than to publish it like that, that is, with phrases that are garbled and contradict each other. Alas! What is to be
done? Those swinish censors: in passages where I mocked at everything and sometimes blasphemed for the sake of appearances—that is let by, and where I concluded with the need for faith and Christ—that is censored. What are the censors doing? Are they conspiring against the government or what?”
13
These comments are of major importance for the interpretation of
Part I
, and we shall return to the problems that they pose.
Meanwhile, Dostoevsky was working away at the second part valiantly, but finding it increasingly difficult to surmount the crushing burden of his almost impossible circumstances. “My friend,” he writes Mikhail at the beginning of April, “I have been ill a good part of the month, then convalescent, and even now I am not yet entirely well. My nerves are shot and I have not been able to get back my strength. I am so grimly tormented by
so many things
that I don’t even wish to speak of them. My wife is dying,
literally
. There is not a day when, at such and such a moment, we do not believe that we see her going. Her sufferings are terrible and this works on me because. . . .” The sentence trails off in this fashion, and Dostoevsky evidently assumes that Mikhail will understand what he leaves unsaid; perhaps he was thinking of his affair with Suslova, whose secret only Mikhail was supposed to have known. Yet, Dostoevsky continues, “I write and write, every morning, . . . [and] the story is getting longer. Sometimes I imagine that it is worth nothing, and yet I write with enthusiasm; I do not know what it will give.”
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Dostoevsky hopes that he can send half of the second part soon to be set up in type, but insists that it can only be published as a whole and not in installments.
Several other letters to Mikhail in early April contain urgent requests for money; and he also outlines an elaborate strategy for extracting a loan on behalf of
Epoch
from their wealthy and pious Moscow aunt. On April 13, Dostoevsky again describes his lamentable condition (“I am in a frightening state, nervous, morally ill”),
15
but provides additional information about his story. He now sees it comprising three chapters: the first is almost finished; the second is drafted but chaotic; the third is not yet begun. Dostoevsky wonders whether the first chapter could not be published by itself, though convinced it would injure the effect of the whole: “deprived of the sequel (the two others are essential) it loses all its juice. You know what a
transition
is in music. This is exactly the same. The first chapter seems to be nothing but chatter; but suddenly this chatter in the last two chapters is resolved by a sudden catastrophe.”
16
These
words, the last in Dostoevsky’s correspondence referring to the composition of
Notes from Underground
, were written six days before Marya Dimitrievna breathed her last.
Over the course of the next several days, other, more ruminative, thoughts occupied Dostoevsky. “Will I ever see Masha again?” Dostoevsky asks in a notebook fragment (20: 172). Keeping a vigil at the bier of his dead wife, Dostoevsky pored over their life together as he sat beside her corpse, and such thoughts led him on to ponder as well the great issues of life on earth and its meaning, and of the possibility of an eternity beyond the grave. In such a severe and solemn moment of self-scrutiny, he tried to unriddle his own answers to these perennial enigmas. Nowhere else does he tell us so unequivocally what he really thought about God, immortality, the role of Christ in human existence, and the meaning of human life on earth.
He endeavors not only to persuade himself that immortality exists, but also to explain why it
must
exist as a necessary completion of terrestrial human life. After asking the poignant question, Dostoevsky turns aside from eternity and shifts his gaze to the vicissitudes of the human condition. “To love man like
oneself
, according to the commandment of Christ,” he declares peremptorily, “is impossible. The law of personality on earth binds. The
Ego
stands in the way” (20: 172). These words were set down just after Dostoevsky had completed the first part of
Notes from Underground
, where he had portrayed the refusal of the human ego to surrender its right to self-assertion—in its rejection, even at the price of madness and self-destruction, of any philosophy that denied this irrepressible human need.
It may appear as if Dostoevsky were inclined to agree with Strakhov—and Christian doctrine—that human nature was incurably rotten, incapable of fulfilling the law of Christ except if strengthened by God’s grace. But Eastern Orthodoxy has always placed more emphasis on man’s free will than on grace; and in the very next sentences of his notebook entry, Dostoevsky makes clear that he does not consider any special gift of grace to be necessary: the incarnation of Christ has been sufficient to spur mankind into eternal struggle against its own limitations:
Christ alone could love man as himself, but Christ was a perpetual eternal ideal to which man strives and, according to the law of nature, should strive. Meanwhile, since the appearance of Christ as
the ideal of man in the flesh
, it has become as clear as day that the . . . highest use a man can make of his personality, of the full development of his
Ego
—is, as it were, to annihilate that
Ego
, to give it totally and to everyone undividedly and unselfishly. In this way, the law of the
Ego
fuses with the law of humanism, and in this fusion both the
Ego
and the all (apparently two extreme opposites)
mutually annihilate themselves one for the other, and at the same time each attains separately, and to the highest degree, their own individual development. (20: 172)
Dostoevsky declares it a “law of nature” that mankind struggle to follow the example of Christ. This belief had been the sole ray of hope piercing the moral darkness by which he had been surrounded in the prison camp; and if its light had not been obscured even by the blackness of prison life, then its radiance could be assumed to continue to glimmer in every Christian breast. This is surely one reason why Dostoevsky had declared, in the heartfelt letter he wrote to Mme Fonvizina shortly after quitting the camp, that “if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that
in reality
the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”
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Dostoevsky is affirming here the depth and strength of his existential commitment to Christ—which meant, concretely, to the moral message of love and self-sacrifice that Christ had brought to the world.
Indeed, the sole significance of Christ, as Dostoevsky now speaks of him, is to serve as the divine enunciator of this morality; he fulfills no other purpose, not even the traditional one of redeeming mankind from the wages of sin and death. There is, in fact, not much difference between the Christ of the notebook entry and the Utopian Socialist Christ whom Dostoevsky had defended against Belinsky in 1845–1846, or the Christ he had described earlier as having been sent by God to the modern world, just as Homer had been dispatched to the ancient one, in order to provide “the organization of its spiritual and earthly life.”
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But, in the intervening years, Dostoevsky had acquired a new realization of all the obstacles that prevented Christ’s message from being embodied in such an “organization”—the chief one being the human ego itself, with its raging demand for the recognition of its rights.
Five years later, Dostoevsky sketched the plan for what he considered the most important project of his creative career—a series of novels to be called
The Life of a Great Sinner
; and the origins of this conception are in the words just quoted. For it is only when the egoism of personality has been expanded to its fullest stretch, only when someone has indeed become a “great sinner,” that the full sublimity of the
imitatio Christi
—the full grandeur of the voluntary self-sacrifice of the personality out of love—can be most effectively presented. Such a self-sacrifice, in Dostoevsky’s view, would unite the law of personality with that of “humanism,” and the use of this term, which had been employed twenty years earlier by Feuerbach and the Left Hegelians to denote the secular and social realization of the Christian law of love, testifies that Dostoevsky, without
abandoning his earlier ideals, was now striving to integrate them with his more recently acquired convictions. But what had once been conceived as a worldly possibility has now receded into the infinite future, and he goes on to declare that “all history, whether of humanity in part or of each man separately, is only the development, struggle, and attainment of this goal [the fusion of egoism and humanism].” Once having reached it, however, mankind would then truly have arrived at “the Paradise of Christ” (20: 172).
In a movement typical of his imaginative manipulation of ideas, Dostoevsky thinks them through to the end and envisages the situation resulting from their completion. “But if that is the final goal of all humanity,” he reasons, “(having attained which it would no longer be necessary to develop, that is, . . . eternally strive toward it)—therefore, it would no longer be necessary to live—then, consequently, when man achieves this, he terminates his earthly existence. Therefore, man on earth is only a creature in development, consequently, someone not finished but transitional.” Earthly human nature, with its necessarily unresolved conflict between egoism and the law of love, is not, then, the final state of mankind, and this conviction enables Dostoevsky to answer the question posed at the beginning of his meditations. “It is completely senseless to attain such a great goal if upon attaining it everything is extinguished and disappears, that is, if man will no longer have life when he attains the goal. Consequently, there is a future paradisial life” (20: 172–173).