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Darwin, Dostoevsky, and Russia's Radical Youth

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Darwin, Dostoevsky, and Russia's Radical Youth I Darwin, Dostoevsky, and Russia’s Radical Youth David Bethea and Victoria Thorstensson The period of the 1860s was one of the most volatile in the history of Russian culture. Normally cited as chief flashpoints of the turmoil are the Reform Manifesto of 1861 liberating the serfs and the heated debate generated in the periodic press by the new legislation’s less-than-perfect implementation. On a practical level, the most pressing issue of the day was how to combine freedom for the serfs (krest’iane), including a path to eventual ownership of the land they worked, with economic sustainability for the nobility (dvorianstvo), including sources of cheap labor needed to run their estates in the future. At the same time, the ideological orientations at the center of much discussion showed a larger thrust and counterthrust, one aimed at capturing the correct notion of “progress”— with all that word entailed—of Russian history at this turning point. It is this second, more capacious discursive arc that permeates the cluster of classic literary texts defining the decade, from Turgenev’s traditional liberal viewpoint in Fathers and Children (Ottsy i deti, 1862), to Chernyshevsky’s radical reposing of the youth movement’s character and aspirations in What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat’?, 1863), to Dostoevsky’s deconstruction of Chernyshevsky’s utilitarianism and “rational egoism” (razumnyi egoizm) in Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia, 1864) and Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866). 36 David Bethea and Victoria Thorstensson The idea of progress, or the right way forward, written into these texts thematically was also mapped onto the plot of generational transition. Corre- spondingly, each of these works produced controversial characters whose stories epitomize this struggle: Turgenev’s Bazarov, the nihilist doctor who dissects frogs to learn how people, with their origins in the animal world, think and feel; Cher- nyshevsky’s “ordinary” threesome of liberated woman Vera Pavlovna, medical student (and savior-cum-fictitious husband of Vera) Lopukhov, and classmate of Lopukhov (and eventual true love of Vera) Kirsanov, along with his “extraordi- nary” new man Rakhmetov; and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who prefers to stay in the “cellar” from which Lopukhov has freed Vera—that cellar (podval) now having morphed from a cage of externally imposed social conditions into something intentionally spiteful and self-created (podpol’e). In Dostoevsky the role of Vera’s viciously manipulative mother is taken over by the Underground Man himself, while the medical-scientific training said to “explain” the social behavior of a Bazarov or Lopukhov collides with the irrationality of the Under- ground Man’s perverse (“I am a sick man”) affection for his own toothache. At the center of the radical youth’s early 1860s flurry of journalistic and creative activity stand several, mutually interlocking epistemological frames, all of which reduce ultimately to the notion of the rational, the measurable, the statistically normative. As Alexander Vucinich writes in his classic Darwin in Russian Thought, “[Nihilism] represented a unique combination of materialism, espoused by Büchner and Moleschott, and positivism, a philosophical legacy of Auguste Comte and his followers. Both [materialism and positivism] viewed Darwinism as a generally successful effort to enhance the power of science in the unceasing war against mysticism, irrationalism and supernaturalism.”1 Our presentation here focuses on the Darwinian frame and on Dostoevsky’s response to that frame as he embarks on his major period. We devote partic- ular attention to Notes from Underground and The Demons (Besy, 1871–72) as texts (and contexts) reacting to the appearance first of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and then of his The Descent of Man (1871). Perhaps more than any others, these two works by Darwin, along with T. H. Huxley’s The Place of Man in Nature (1863), set the tone for debate in the 1860s and 1870s. With typical Russian cultural impatience, the battle lines are drawn between those wanting to hurry the process of natural selection along up the 1 Alexander Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 26. Darwin, Dostoevsky, and Russia’s Radical Youth 37 zoological ladder and interpret “survival of the fittest”2 in new democratic terms and those insisting that human instinct hides the basis for morality and that altruism is neither rational nor empirically probative. In short, the elegant unpacking of finches’ beaks as differing foraging tools depending on an island’s locale and topography in the Galapagos becomes the broad brush of Social Darwinism. In Dostoevsky’s and his interlocutors’ (both friendly and adversarial) telling, this shift is a contested one for the idea of “progress.” For the record, by the time Dostoevsky enters the fray with Notes, a lively exchange on the meaning of Darwin’s epochal discoveries has already been taking place among leading scientists and cultural critics, including A. N. Beketov, Dzh. G. L’iuis (George Henry Lewes), N. N. Strakhov, S. A. Rachinsky, K. A. Timiryazev, and M. A. Antonovich. For example, the distinguished botanist Andrei Beketov argues in the Russian Messenger (Russkii vestnik) as early as 1860, without mentioning Darwin, that organic nature is defined more by harmonious balance than disruptive struggle and by a parts-to-whole and whole-to-parts proto-aware- ness more suggestive of Lamarck (and before him Aristotle’s entelechy). By the same token, Nikolai Strakhov, who began as a physics and math teacher and went on to defend a master’s thesis on the bone structure of the mammalian wrist, writes in Dostoevsky’s Time (Vremia) already in 1862, in his review of different translations of On the Origin of Species, about the latent dangers—or as he terms it “bad signs” (durnye priznaki)—of applying the scientific method to other disci- plines, a trend that will expand in subsequent years into full-blown Social Darwinism, while the soon-to-be-eminent plant physiologist Kliment Timiryazev becomes the Russian version of “Darwin’s Bulldog” in his 1863–64 comments in Fatherland Notes (Otechestvennye zapiski), arguing strongly in favor of organic transformation and in so doing adding his impeccable imprimatur to the sociocul- tural links between Darwinism and nihilism. It is against this heated background that the Chernyshevsky-versus-Dostoevsky polemic takes center stage. From the “Anthropological Principle” and What Is to Be Done? to Notes from Underground A cornerstone of the nihilists’ program was the idea that progress must be presented in a manner devoid of metaphysics—1840s Hegelian explanations for how an abstract spirit expressed itself in history through a process of dialectic 2 The phrase was initially Herbert Spencer’s. 38 David Bethea and Victoria Thorstensson winnowing needed to be replaced by a scientific episteme that explained concrete examples of actual organic life through the physiological and the empirically measurable. Natural science provided what appeared to be an indis- putable means of organizing the material of life in a manner that applied to all; it was meaningful in that it made sense, and it was democratic in that it only recognized its own authority, not that of church, state, or traditional metaphysics. The premises underlying Chernyshevsky’s scientific program were laid out for all to see in his “Anthropological Principle in Philosophy” (Antropologi­ cheskii printsip v filosofii), which appeared in the Contemporary (Sovremennik) in 1860.3 This rambling stroll through current ideas about the natural world had one overarching purpose: to build by analogy logical bridges from the, by now accepted, “tight” knowledge that science had produced about such phenomena as the chemical reactions involved in metallurgy to the still disputed, “looser” speculation about causality versus free will in human behavior. Chernyshevsky’s tone throughout is confident, almost breezy, as he moves from the realm of the inorganic to the organic, from social classes to nations to humanity in general. The ideas that he advances are crucial to all subsequent discussions of the role of Darwinian evolution in Russian social life:4 1 Because of his practical life experience and working-class background, the European “common man” (prostoliudin) is better able to under- stand how the real world works than someone from the privileged classes, but what he needs now is access to scientific knowledge.5 3 Nos. 4–5 of vol. 80: http://az.lib.ru/c/chernyshewskij_n_g/text_0430.shtml. “Anthropo- logical Principle” begins as an overview of P. L. Lavrov’s Ocherki voprosov prakticheskoi filosofii (1860) but soon launches into Chernyshevsky’s own arguments as to how the methods of the natural sciences can (and should) be applied when studying any aspect of the living world, including human history and social behavior. 4 To be sure, Chernyshevsky does not cite Darwin anywhere directly in his essay, as the English naturalist’s ideas were just making their way to Russia at this time, but his formula- tions are pervaded throughout by the scientific logic then being championed by Darwin and his followers, especially the idea that human nature and animal nature are one. Later in his career Chernyshevsky would disagree with aspects of popular Darwinism, including its emphasis on competition (“survival of the fittest”) at the expense of cooperation (socialism). 5 “Благодаря своей здоровой натуре,
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