The bust of Dostoevsky on his grave DOSTOEVSKY The Mantle of the Prophet 1871-1881 JOSEPH FRANK Princeton University Press Copyright © 2002 ISBN 0-6911-1569-9 This final volume, like my first, is dedicated to my wife, Marguerite, my lifelong companion, critic, and inspiration. And to our daughters Claudine and Isabelle, and grandchildren Sophie and Henrik. CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Transliteration and Texts xv PART I: A NEW BEGINNING Chapter 1: Introduction 3 Chapter 2: A Quiet Return 14 Chapter 3: Grazhdanin: The Citizen 38 Chapter 4: Narodnichestvo: Russian Populism 65 Chapter 5: The Diary of a Writer, 1873:1 87 Chapter 6: The Diary of a Writer, 1873: II 103 Chapter 7: At Bad Ems 120 Chapter 8: A Literary Proletarian 130 Chapter 9: Notes for A Raw Youth 149 Chapter 10: A Raw Youth: Dostoevsky's Trojan Horse 171 PART II: A PERSONAL PERIODICAL Chapter 11: A New Venture 199 Chapter 12: A Public Figure 215 Chapter 13: Intimations of Mortality 235 Chapter 14: The Diary of a Writer, 1876-1877 254 Chapter 15: Toward The Brothers Karamazov 282 Chapter 16: The Jewish Question 301 Chapter 17: Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Others 320 Chapter 18: Stories and Sketches 338 part III: "with words to sear the hearts of men" Chapter 19: Resurrection and Rebellion 361 Chapter 20: Man in the Middle 377 Chapter 21: A New Novel—and a Feuilleton 390 Chapter 22: The Great Debate 407 Chapter 23: Rebellion and the Grand Inquisitor 426 Chapter 24: A Last Visit 443 Chapter 25: An Impatient Reader 460 Chapter 26: Terror and Martial Law 475 Chapter 27: The Pushkin Festival 497 Chapter 28: Pushkin: Two Readings 514 Chapter 29: The Diary of a Writer, 1880 533 Chapter 30: Controversies and Conclusions 548 PART IV: THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV Chapter 31: The Brothers Karamazov: Books 1-2 567 Chapter 32: The Brothers Karamazov: Books 3-4 588 Chapter 33: The Brothers Karamazov: Book 5 600 Chapter 34: The Brothers Karamazov: Book 6 621 Chapter 35: The Brothers Karamazov: Book 7 636 Chapter 36: The Brothers Karamazov: Books 8-9 646 Chapter 37: The Brothers Karamazov: Books 10-11 662 Chapter 38: The Brothers Karamazov: Book 12 684 PART V: DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION Chapter 40: A National Symbol 722 Chapter 41: Finale 740 Notes: 757 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations are from Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky v Portretakh, illyustratsiyakh, dokumentakh, ed. V. S. Nech-aeva (Moscow, 1972). The bust of Dostoevsky on his grave frontis 1. Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev. Courtesy of Phototime 20 2. Dostoevsky in 1872, by V. G. Perov. Courtesy of Collection Viollet 25 3. The country house of the Dostoevskys in Staraya Russa 27 4. A Mysterious Evening, by N. N. Ge 44 5. Vsevolod Solovyev, a young writer and friend of Dostoevsky's 50 6. Vladimir Solovyev, younger brother of Vsevolod, also a friend of Dostoevsky's and an important Russian philosopher. Courtesy of Phototime 51 7. Nikolay K. Mikhailovsky, populist critic and publicist 71 8. Barge Haulers on the Volga, by I. E. Repin 111 9. Tolstoy in 1877, by I. N. Kramskoy 139 10. Radical writer Mikhail E. Saltykov-Shchedrin 141 11. Dostoevsky in 1876 216 12. Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevskaya in 1878 227 13. The ailing Nikolay A. Nekrasov in 1877, by I. N. Kramskoy 236 14. The study in St. Petersburg where Dostoevsky worked on The Brothers Karamazov 464 15. The Pushkin statue 493 16. The unveiling of the Pushkin monument, June 6, 1880 510 17. A page from the manuscript of The Brothers Karamazov 589 18. Dostoevsky on his bier, by I. N. Kramskoy 750 PREFACE This is the fifth and final volume of my series of books on Dostoevsky. It marks the end of a long journey, and if someone, many years ago, had told me that I should someday embark on it, I would certainly have replied that nothing was more unlikely. Before undertaking the present work I had been primarily interested in contemporary literature, and had published a volume of essays (The Widening Gyre) that included "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," still recognized as an important contribution to the aesthetics of the modern novel. I saw myself primarily as a literary critic, not as a biographer or cultural historian, though I had no objection to using whatever information was relevant to the better understanding of a work of art. My original project was thus to undertake a single, reasonably sized volume on Dostoevsky, devoted mainly to his novels. But by the time I came to write a first draft, the very nature of my approach made it almost inevitable that my initial intention would grow in size and scope. Indeed, it continued to do so even after I was well under way; and on completing my second volume, I realized that what had become a four-volume project would have to be extended to five. My concern with Dostoevsky, as I explained in the preface to my first volume, had grown out of my interest in French Existentialism. For Sartre and Camus, a work such as Notes from Underground, and characters such as Raskolnikov (in Crime and Punishment) and Kirillov (in The Devils), had become essential landmarks to which they referred in defining their own points of view. (And of course it was not only for French Existentialists that Dostoevsky was important; his picture hung in Heidegger's study throughout his lifetime.) But the more I read him, the more dissatisfied I became with the usual interpretations I encountered. Either he was viewed largely in purely personal, psychological terms, or he was discussed in relation to the general philosophical and theological issues raised in his novels; and these were frequently, as in the case of Existentialism, linked to one or another contemporary philosophical movement, beginning with the Nietzschean vogue of the late nineteenth century. It is impossible to read Dostoevsky, however, without becoming aware that his major characters are deeply involved in the social-political ideologies and problems of their time; but his own so-called political ideas seemed so eccentric that hardly anyone took them seriously. Indeed, it was felt necessary to get them out of the way if one were to do him justice as a novelist. I still recall an article by Philip Rahv on The Devils many years ago, in which, while praising Dostoevsky's prophetic insight into the dangers of Russian radicalism, the critic carefully explained that he had known nothing about Socialism. But if he could read the future of Socialism in Russia with such clairvoyance, how could he have been so ignorant of what its doctrines really represented? Questions such as these arose for me regarding other works as well, and I found highly unsatisfactory the general notion that, since Dostoevsky's involvement with the ideologies of his time seemed so unsympathetic, it was best either to forget about them or to expatiate on the vast difference between literary creativity and social-political sobriety. Moreover, the more I learned about the actual social-cultural context from which his writings had emerged, the more I began to feel that the usual opinion should be entirely reversed, and that it was necessary to study their ideological background very carefully. To be sure, this analysis had been undertaken very conscientiously in contemporary Russian criticism and scholarship of the last half- century, and I have drawn freely and gratefully on its results. But, as I also became aware, these scholars were forced to adopt a view of Russian cultural history that placed severe constraints on how they could interpret the role played by Dostoevsky in their own past. There thus seemed to be room for a study unhampered by such limitations, one that probed his point of departure with as much objectivity and impartiality as possible. Of course, Dostoevsky's genius raised the problems he was dramatizing to moral-philosophical heights involving the most crucial questions of Judeo-Christian thought and experience. My aim was certainly not to remove them from this empyrean realm; but these questions had been posed for him in the Russian terms of his own time and place, and if we are to follow the trajectory by which they were elevated to a level rivaling that of great poetic tragedy, it seemed to me necessary to grasp their point of origin as accurately as could be done. My own attempt along these lines began with Notes from Underground. It was in grappling with this text that I began to understand the complexity of the relations in his writings between psychology and ideology, and how important it was for a proper comprehension of the first to identify its roots in the social-cultural context of the second. Once launched, I continued to investigate other works from the same point of view, and finally to study his creative career as a whole. But I thought it essential, as a literary critic, not only to explore this context but also to show how it could be applied to offer fresher views of Dostoevsky's artistic aims and accomplishments. Each of my previous books has thus been dominated by the ideology of the period in which Dostoevsky was creating, and in this final one I focus on the relatively unexplored relation of his novels of the L87O8 to the doctrines of Russian Populism. Since I was, however, writing for American readers who had only the haziest knowledge (if any at all) of Russian cultural history, this meant filling in the background at some length. It was this necessity that ultimately compelled me, as the pages piled up, to abandon my one-volume idea and to settle down for the long haul.