“This is a wonderful and illuminating collection written for general readers. Yet any Russian specialist can also benefit from Frank’s interpretations, which bear the stamp of his powerful and distinctive mind. This thought-provoking book is difficult to put down and the coda on Nabokov’s lectures is a delight.”–Gary Saul Morson, Northwestern University

Joseph Frank (1918–2013) was professor of comparative and Russian literature at Princeton and Stanford. The five volumes of his Dostoevsky biography won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, two James Russell Lowell Prizes, two Christian Gauss Awards, and other honors. The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies awarded Frank its highest honor.

BETWEEN RELIGION AND RATIONALITY

ESSAYS IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND CULTUREBy Joseph Frank

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 JOSEPH FRANK
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14566-2

Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………1ONE Poor Folk and House of the Dead……………………………………9TWO The Idiot……………………………………………………….29THREE Demons………………………………………………………..46FOUR War and Peace…………………………………………………..64FIVE Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia………………………87SIX A Life of Pushkin………………………………………………..107SEVEN Oblomov and Goncharov…………………………………………..118EIGHT Lydia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose……………………………129NINE Richard Pipes, Russian Conservatism and Its Critics…………………143TEN Dostoevsky and Anti-Semitism………………………………………159ELEVEN In Search of Dostoevsky………………………………………..173TWELVE Arkady Kovner…………………………………………………185THIRTEEN J. M. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg………………………..196FOURTEEN Dostoevsky and Evil………………………………………….204FIFTEEN Anton Chekhov………………………………………………..219SIXTEEN The Triumph of Abram Tertz…………………………………….230SEVENTEEN D. S. Mirsky……………………………………………….249EIGHTEEN Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature……………………….261Index……………………………………………………………….287

Chapter One

POOR FOLK AND HOUSE OF THE DEAD

If one were asked to select two books of Dostoevsky that represented the variety and range of his literary talent, no better choice could be made than The House of the Dead and Poor Folk. Dostoevsky is best known for his larger and later novels such as Crime and Punishment, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, while an influential critical tradition views him primarily as the unsurpassed chronicler of the moral-psychological dilemmas of the alienated, refractory urban intelligentsia. Once he became more widely known outside of Russia, this latter aspect of his work has had the greatest influence on later writers; but it represents much too limited a perspective on the full scope of his creations.

To be sure, there are elements of the later Dostoevsky in Poor Folk, with its vivid depiction of the St. Petersburg background and its first embryonic sketch of intelligentsia types. Its main character, though, is not a member of this group at all and anything but rebellious. He is a humble, socially and emotionally downtrodden clerk in the vast Russian bureaucracy of St. Petersburg, frightened to death at his temerity in questioning, even in thought, the supreme virtues of the God-ordained order in which he lives.

House of the Dead, on the other hand, stands alone in the Dostoevsky corpus as an unprecedented depiction, the first in Russian literature, of the prison gulags of the vast tsarist empire. Dostoevsky’s initial readers were shocked by the conditions of life he described, but we have since learned from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago that these were relatively humane compared to their successors under the Bolsheviks. The book also contains a gallery of Russian peasant-types and sketches of Russian peasant life that equal those of Turgenev and Tolstoy, both of whom admired the book (Tolstoy thought it the best work Dostoevsky had ever written). Such peasant-types are depicted only fleetingly in the major novels; but they were by no means outside his artistic purview.

These two books are thus miles apart in theme and artistic treatment. The first initiates Dostoevsky’s exploration of guilt-ridden characters; the second demonstrates his ability as an objective reporter and observer of a new social milieu. But there is one thing they have in common: both opened the path to fame (if not to fortune) for their author. Poor Folk brought him into the forefront of the Russian literary scene at the age of twenty-four, and for a brief period he was, quite literally, the talk of the town.

House of the Dead, on the other hand, was begun when he was thirty-nine, having returned to Russia after serving a prison sentence in Siberia and being absent from the literary scene for ten years. His first creations at this time, the novellas Uncle’s Dream and A Friend of the Family, were received quite tepidly, and it was generally felt that his talent had not survived his exile. His prison memoirs, however, convinced even his detractors that they had been mistaken. These memoirs created a sensation by opening up a world hitherto concealed from the Russian reader. For the first time, the outcast criminal inhabitants of this hidden universe, generally looked down upon as little better than subhuman, were treated with respect and even occasionally with sympathy. Dostoevsky made no effort to conceal their sometimes horrendous crimes; but he saw them as sentient human beings whose behavior deserved to be understood if not pardoned.

Two

Poor Folk is Dostoevsky’s first novel, and the story of its creation, as well as its reception, has become famous in the annals of Russian literature. Both Feodor Dostoevsky and his older brother Mikhail had made up their minds as adolescents to pursue a literary career. Both, however, obeyed the wishes of their father to study to become military engineers, and Dostoevsky was still taking advanced courses, though living independently, in the years just preceding his literary dbut. Even before leaving home for their studies, he and Mikhail had steeped themselves in the literature of their time. Indeed, the admiration of the youthful Feodor for Pushkin was so great that, on hearing of the poet’s death in a duel (1837), he told his family that if he had not already been wearing mourning for his mother, he would have done so in memory of the poet. One of the very last speeches he made in his life was a panegyric of Pushkin as equal, if not superior, to the greatest writers of European literature.

Dostoevsky came to maturity during a transition period of Russian culture, a moment when it was evolving from the metaphysical and fantastic motifs of German Romanticism toward the more down-to-earth social thematics of the French. His letters to Mikhail are thus filled with references to writers of both types. E.T.A. Hoffmann enjoyed a tremendous vogue at this time in Russia, and in 1838 Feodor writes that he had read “all of Hoffmann in Russian and German.” He continued to admire this Romantic fabulist and in 1861 wrote an article declaring him superior to Edgar Allen Poe. But he was enthusiastically proclaiming at the same time that “Balzac is great. His characters are the creations of universal mind!” Dostoevsky’s first publication, as a matter of fact, was a translation of Balzac’s Eugnie Grandet undertaken at the end of 1843 to supplement his income.

If Balzac was important for Dostoevsky, of perhaps even greater significance was Victor Hugo, who in one of his poems spoke of himself as having “pleaded for those who are the lowest and the most miserable.” In a letter of 1840, Dostoevsky declared Hugo’s Christian social Romanticism to be as momentous for the modern world as Homer had been for the ancient; and Hugo’s social Christian radicalism left a permanent imprint on his own ideological views. One of Hugo’s works, Le dernier jour d’un condamne (The Last Day of a Condemned Man) is the diary of someone awaiting execution for an unspecified crime-an intensely moving, and still very relevant, anguished outcry against capital punishment. Dostoevsky knew it by heart; and when he believed he was going to be executed himself, phrases from it returned to his mind. Traces of its effect can also be found throughout his novels.

In the early 1840s, the most prestigious literary genre was still that of Romantic tragedy, with Russians like Pushkin (Boris Godunov) following in the footsteps of Shakespeare, Schiller, and Hugo. It is thus no surprise that Dostoevsky’s first try at literary composition should have been in this genre. In 1841 he read to friends parts of two dramas, Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov, which alas have not survived. But the titles are enough to show the range of his literary ambition, which did not hesitate to measure itself against the greatest. Romantic drama, however, was already losing its appeal for the younger generation, and Dostoevsky’s own evolution followed the literary trend.

The new vogue turned to the social thematics of French Romanticism, as well as to the prose forms that had been developed there, among them the so-called physiological sketch, intended to portray the feel and texture of ordinary life. One of the dominating figures of Russian literature, the impassioned and fiery critic Vissarion Belinsky, had become converted to French Utopian socialism in 1841 and immediately began to urge Russian writers to follow the French example. Gogol’s Dead Souls had been published in 1842, and the Petersburg Tales, including The Overcoat, in 1843. Belinsky interpreted Gogol very freely as having pioneered the down-to-earth and socially conscious depiction of Russian life that he wished to encourage; and in 1843, as a memoirist tells us, Dostoevsky “was particularly fond of reading Gogol, and loved to declaim pages of Dead Souls by heart.”

Dostoevsky did not immediately surrender the idea of writing for the stage, but now he refers to a work called The Jew Yankel (a character in Gogol’s novel, Taras Bulba), which indicates a shift to a less elevated subject. Whether such a work was ever written remains in doubt; but in the early fall of 1844 he tells Mikhail he is working on “a rather original novel” that he hopes will bring in four hundred rubles. This is the first reference to Poor Folk, which he planned to send to Belinsky’s journal Notes of the Fatherland. The manuscript, however, reached its destination by a much more original route.

Three

Dostoevsky was then sharing a flat with D. V. Grigorovich, himself a burgeoning writer, and read him the completed work. Grigorovich was so impressed that he took the manuscript to N. A. Nekrasov, destined to become a famous poet and already an active literary editor. Both were so overcome that they rushed to Dostoevsky’s apartment at four in the morning-it was a Petersburg “white night”-to congratulate him on his accomplishment. They belonged to a group of young writers who, clustered around Belinsky, were known as his pliade; and Nekrasov brought him the manuscript the next day. Belinsky’s reaction is best described in the words of P. V. Annenkov, an important critic and cultural commentator, who visited him two days later. “You see this manuscript?” he said. “I haven’t been able to tear myself away from it for almost two days now. It’s a novel by a beginner, a new talent … but his novel reveals such secrets of life and character in Russia as no one before even dreamed of … it’s the first attempt at a social novel we’ve had.”

Belinsky’s enthusiasm is quite understandable because, as Dostoevsky wrote to Mikhail shortly after joining the pliade himself, he “seriously sees in me a public proof and justification of his opinions.” The critic had called for the Russians to follow the French, and to depict lower-class Russian life in all its varieties (a famous sketch by Grigorovich, used by Dostoevsky in Poor Folk, was devoted to organ-grinders). But emphasis in such works was placed on the description of externals, on photographic accuracy (the sketches were also called “daguerrotypes” and accompanied by illustrations), rather than on imaginative penetration and inner identification with the people involved. Also, even when an author collected sketches in a volume, they were not united by any sort of narrative continuity. Dostoevsky created the first Russian social novel by fusing such physiological sketches into a story about two lonely souls struggling to keep afloat in the treacherous sea of St. Petersburg life.

Dostoevsky is once supposed to have said (though the source has never been located, and the remark is sometimes attributed to Turgenev) that all of Russian literature emerged from Gogol’s The Overcoat. Whether or not Dostoevsky ever uttered such a thought, there is no doubt that the dictum applies to Poor Folk. Indeed, the reference to Gogol illustrates a more important general point. There has been a strong tendency, especially in Western criticism, to focus on Dostoevsky’s quite sensational biography in seeking to explore the sources of his work; but such sources are as much literary and social-cultural as purely personal. Whatever happened in his life was invariably assimilated and interpreted in terms of such a larger context. To understand his work, it is thus necessary to keep this surrounding ideological framework constantly in mind.

In Poor Folk, we find the influence not only of Gogol but also of Nikolay Karamzin, a dominating literary figure of the time, the title of whose story, Poor Liza, would immediately come to the mind of the Russian reader. Both works depict the sad fate of the lower classes (a peasant flower-girl in Karamzin, seduced and abandoned by a noble lover), but Dostoevsky’s tone is far grittier than Karamzin’s idyllic-sentimental treatment. Parodies are also included in Poor Folk of Romantic historical novels, and reference is made to the latest vogue for “physiological sketches.” Of most importance is the relation of Poor Folk to two stories, Pushkin’s The Stationmaster and Gogol’s The Overcoat, both of which are read by Dostoevsky’s main character, Makar Devushkin. The first, like Poor Liza, again dwells on the misfortunes of the humble and the defenseless when confronted with their betters; and Makar sees his own sad fate prefigured in that of the hapless stationmaster. Gogol’s story, however, drives him into a rage; and a good way to approach Poor Folk is to examine the reason for such indignation.

The Overcoat is very far from embodying the plea for social justice that Belinsky was now advocating, though it does contain one passage in which such an appeal is made. The story, however, is as much a caricature of the main figure, who bears the implicitly scatological name of Akaky Akakievich, as it is a call for a more benevolent attitude toward those of his inferior status. Gogol’s story takes its place in a long line in which such characters-lower-level copyists and clerks in the St. Petersburg bureaucracy-were the butt of comic anecdotes; and his own treatment is no different. Akaky is a human cipher, perfectly happy to grind away at his routine task and incapable of assuming any other; the narrator views him with the same relentless mockery that Akaky experiences at the hands of his office-mates. But at one point a younger clerk rebukes the others for mercilessly tormenting their helpless victim and reminds them that he is, after all, “their brother.” Akaky’s life is temporarily enriched when he acquires a new overcoat (hence the title), which becomes for him the equivalent of a loved object. A few days later it is stolen as he is walking home during the night. Unceremoniously evicted when he shows up at the home of an official of his district to appeal for aid, he dies shortly afterwards.

Four

Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk turns this story inside out, as it were, by adopting the form of the sentimental epistolary novel. His two main characters write letters to each other, and we thus become aware of everything through their reactions and responses rather than through the supercilious remarks of a narrator. Makar Devushkin is a middle-aged copying clerk like Akaky, and his correspondent is Varvara Dobreselova, a young girl barely out of her teens. They are related in some distant fashion, and Makar is trying to protect her from the wiles of a procuress who, in the guise of a friend of the family, has already succeeded in selling her once to a wealthy libertine. Devushkin is timidly in love with Varvara himself, but the difference in their ages, if nothing else, makes any such relation impossible; what she feels for him is friendly affection and gratitude, nothing more.

Both are tender, lonely, fragile souls, whose solicitude for each other brings a ray of warmth into their otherwise bleak lives; but their innocent little idyll is soon ended by the pressure of the sordid forces against which they struggle. Devushkin reduces himself to abject poverty for the sake of Varvara, and he suffers agonies of humiliation, which he tries to conceal, as he sinks lower and lower in the social scale. Finally, Varvara’s violator shows up again and churlishly offers her marriage-not out of remorse or even desire but because he wishes to engender an heir to disinherit a nephew. The hopelessness of her position, and the chance to reestablish her social situation, compel Varvara to accept a loveless union with a callous mate and a harsh life in the Russian provinces.

This simple storyline is surrounded with a number of accessories that enlarge it into a true social novel. Inserted among the earlier letters is Varvara’s diary, which introduces the classic contrast between the happiness and innocence of rustic childhood and the dangers and corruptions of the city. In these pages we catch a glimpse of a succession of penniless girls who have suffered the same fate as Varvara, or who, under the guise of beneficence, are being prepared for it by the sinister procuress Anna Feodorovna. The same insert-diary also contains the portrait of the gravely ill tubercular student young Pokrovsky, a devotee of Pushkin, who is Dostoevsky’s first delineation of the new young intellectual, a raznochinets (someone with no official rank or status), eventually to evolve into Raskolnikov. As Varvara’s informal tutor and intellectual mentor, he stirs her first romantic feelings. Pokrovsky is the illegitimate son of Bykov, the same landowner who raped Varvara, by another of Anna Feodorovna’s “proteges”; the latter was then married off to a hopelessly drunken ex-clerk who gave the young man his name.

(Continues…)

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