Irving Howe 1949
Source: American Mercury, October 1949. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Neither by temperament nor training was Feodor Dostoyevsky fit for journalism. The qualities one usually associates with the journalist - an impersonal conciseness, an ability to marshal and order facts, and a willingness to let those facts rest, not to burrow into their possible inner meanings - were hardly conspicuous in Dostoyevsky’s literary personality. From his earliest years, he had been seized by the claws of the modern chaos, and in the hope of finding a new health through the catharsis of disease he had sacrificially exposed himself to the consequences of that chaos. Such a man, while conceivable as a prophet or revolutionist or artist, is hardly the sort one would imagine as the working editor of a topical journal.
Yet at the age of 51, when he was already quite famous as the author of Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky decided to become an editor. When a dim-witted reactionary aristocrat, Prince Meshchersky, offered him the editorship of The Citizen at 250 rubles a month, Dostoyevsky took the post. Why, at the peak of his creative powers, he permitted himself to be diverted to a chore he despised, it would now be difficult to say. He had an urge to preach to his contemporaries, he burned with Messianic Slavophilism, his psychic imbalance drove him to constant exercises in oral athleticism, he badly needed money - all true but none sufficient. The difficulty in citing motives for Dostoyevsky’s behaviour is not that they are likely to be untrue, but that they are likely, even in their sum, to be insufficient. In his life, as in his mind, nothing was unilinear, nothing orderly - and so, with a characteristic readiness to fall into experiences alien to his nature, he became an editor.
It was a beastly job: churning out copy for his column, ‘The Diary of a Writer’, polishing up the stupid and illiterate articles of his publisher, quarrelling with printers and censors, sweating over proofs on steamy summer nights. His articles were badly written, painfully long-winded, sententious, alternatingly brutal and sentimental, hysterical and drab; but even at their very worst they retain the peculiar Dostoyevskian tone - the tone of prophetic compulsion, of sainted neuroticism.
After working for a year on The Citizen, Dostoyevsky quit his job, but in 1876 he launched his own journal, The Diary, which was written entirely by himself and appeared irregularly until shortly before his death in 1881. His contributions to the two magazines have now been collected in two volumes under the somewhat misleading title, The Diary of a Writer, [1] the first complete English version.
The dominating formal theme of these articles is Dostoyevsky’s conception of Russian destiny. Everything characteristically Russian, he believed, ‘everything that is ours, pre-eminently national (and therefore, everything genuinely artistic) - is unintelligible to Europe’. In his mind Russia was inseparable from the Orthodox church, which he took to be the sole unsullied and unbureaucratised vessel of Christianity. ‘Isn’t there in Orthodoxy alone both the truth and the salvation of the Russian people, and - in the forthcoming centuries - of mankind as a whole? Hasn’t there been preserved in Orthodoxy alone, in all its purity, the Divine image of Christ?’ Moaning over the oppression of the Slavs by the Turks, he wrote with apparently unhesitant conviction that Tsarist Russia would prove the liberator of the Slavs. Ergo: ‘Sooner or later, Constantinople must be ours.’
To buttress his mystical faith in Russian destiny and his quite unmystical devotion to the political ambitions of Tsarist Russia, Dostoyevsky developed a theory of national character that is a striking anticipation of a whole strand of twentieth-century thought. ‘Every great people believes, and must believe if it intends to live long, that in it alone resides the salvation of the world; that it lives in order to stand at the head of the nations...’
An extraordinary paradox: the writer whose central aesthetic image is Christ turning the other cheek shouts for the imperialist conquest of Constantinople; the almost craven apostle of absolute love and humility justifies the domination of the weak by the strong. This, alas, is part of the truth about Dostoyevsky, though not all of it; the great writer who trembles for the slightest pain of the slightest living creature can also be a coarse and brutal reactionary.
For there was something coarse and brutal in Dostoyevsky. He knew it perfectly well; hence his desperate straining for love and humility. The love-seeker or the God-hunter is particularly vulnerable to hysteria and self-torment if he inwardly suspects that he seldom experiences true love, if he does not really accept God and secretly rejoices only in his own ego. That is a central ambivalence of neurotic character - one is almost tempted to say of modern character; and it is nowhere more spectacularly illustrated than in Dostoyevsky, whose spiritual image was the gentle saint Alyosha Karamazov, but whose actual life was tainted by the sensation-lust of Dmitri Karamazov and the nihilistic wish for self-destruction of Prince Stavrogin.
Dostoyevsky was frightened by his vision of humanity’s capacity for evil - not the rather thin ‘metaphysical’ evil that has recently worried amateur moralists, but the very practical and ‘tangible’ evil of common experience. Are not, in fact, all of his novels screams of warning? Look at what man can do! Look at the corruption into which he can sink once he discards Christian morality! Today, in the middle of the twentieth century, even those of us indifferent to theories of ‘original sin’ or ‘ineradicable guilt’ must acknowledge the substantiality of Dostoyevsky’s vision of evil.
At least in part, Dostoyevsky’s politics is a function of his psychology, that is, of his struggle to heal his internal moral fissure and of his recoil from the depths he found in all men. (In fact, his politics is so reft with contradictions and so disordered by the intrusion of non-political categories that there is little point to discussing it as an independent system; its major significance is as a refraction of a great artist’s struggle to relate himself to his world.) Dostoyevsky dreaded the power of intellect unmoored, the faithless drifting he so marvellously portrayed in Ivan Karamazov; he feared that the intellectual, loosed from the controls of Christianity and alienated from the heart-warmth of the Russian people, would feel free to commit the most monstrous acts in order to quench his vanity. For, argued Dostoyevsky, once man is free from his responsibility to God, what limits can there be to his arrogance? - an argument that might be more convincing if there were historical evidence that believers as a group have been conspicuously less arrogant and more humane than heretics. But even if one does not accept his argument, one must acknowledge the validity of Dostoyevsky’s portrait of the era in which faith has been lost.
Though a tendentious moralist, Dostoyevsky was a completely honest novelist, and in his novels he could not help but show that while the will to faith may be strong in the intellectual, that will is unable to ripen into the peace of faith itself. Consequently, the God-seekers are men peculiarly driven by anguish: the more serious their quest for God, the more must they acknowledge the distance still separating them from Him. And since their quest is partly motored by an intense distaste for the commercial values of modern life, they often find themselves in unpremeditated opposition to official society. Their ideas, it is true, have nothing in common with socialist doctrine, but their values entice them into uneasy kinship with the critical aspects of that doctrine.
Yet they cannot accept socialism as a hope for the future. Dostoyevsky despised it as wretchedly ‘scientific’, that is, as tied to the Enlightenment which he saw as the source of rationalistic atheism; he rejected it also because he feared it would mean a bartering of man’s freedom for a piece of bread. No political system which claimed that human salvation could be reached within secular limits could have been acceptable to Dostoyevsky, and in a sense the critic R P Blackmur is right when he says that Dostoyevsky’s politics were those of a man ‘whose way of dealing with life rested on a fundamental belief that a true rebirth, a great conversion, can come only after a great sin’. But Blackmur’s observation is true only in part; a dialectical counter-term is still to be supplied.
Dostoyevsky’s politics were, indeed, as Blackmur says, ‘non-social’ and hence apocalyptic, but they were also tinged with his intense fascination for the social politics of the Russian revolutionary movements of his day. Though he despised the ideas of those movements, his mind had been soaked in the immediate atmospheres that nurtured them, and consequently his intellectual divergence from them was less significant than his temperamental affinity with them. Dismayed by the present, and disdainful of those who claimed to speak for the future, Dostoyevsky had but one recourse - to construct an idyllic version of the past. That idyllic past, remnants of which he found in nineteenth-century Russia, was the communal life of the Russian peasant. (He had to find remnants in nineteenth-century Russia; otherwise, his notion of the peasant would not have seemed to him as magnificent as it did in fact seem.) The peasant’s greatness of soul was based on his ‘craving for suffering, perpetual and unquenchable suffering’, and this greatness, Dostoyevsky insisted, had flourished best before Russia had been corroded by Western thought. That Dostoyevsky knew perfectly well how debased and ignorant the peasant actually was, that Dostoyevsky was himself totally urban and plebeian merely aggravated the tensions his ideas produced in his psychic economy.
The peasant, Dostoyevsky said, was rooted in both the soil and a strong national-religious tradition, the two sustaining each other; the peasant kept before him ‘the Divine image of Christ'; the peasant was not tortured by doubt, and hence even when he sinned he at least knew whom to beg for forgiveness. This was the source of his possible greatness of character, and only in its warming circle could the intellectual find peace and purpose.
Now it should be recognised that Dostoyevsky’s peasant was as much a figure of idealisation as the proletarian of the cruder Marxists, that his ideal Russia had about the same relation to reality as T S Eliot’s ‘idea of a Christian society’ has to any of the existing Christian states. Dostoyevsky’s Russia was a desperate ‘projection backwards’, in which the Russian Orthodox creed was wrenched to enclose in it the utopian vision of the Westernised Russian intellectuals with whom Dostoyevsky had associated. At the same time, it must be recognised that such a ‘projection backward’, while it may be the premise for the most acute criticism of the present, can easily lend itself to unsavoury purposes. Between Dostoyevsky and the journalist agents of the Tsar there was literally a world of difference - the difference, at the very least, between a mind in struggle and minds bought. But it is the tragedy of a reactionary position such as Dostoyevsky’s that it can easily be prodded into serving the society it despises. A confusion or blurring takes place in the writer’s mind - between the ideal and the actual Russia, the ideal and the actual peasant. Thus, the Dostoyevsky who ached for love could also find a strange pleasure in writing like the worst chauvinist: ‘Lasting peace always generates cruelty, cowardice and coarse, fat egoism.’ The saint could also be a bit of a bully.
Yet the ‘other’ Dostoyevsky appears in these articles, too. When the censors objected to one of his pieces, he went to jail; when his publisher suggested that students be housed in barracks so that the government could spy on them, he repudiated the proposal with horror. In his novels, where the seething ‘doubleness’ of his values breaks through the crust of his formal ideas, Dostoyevsky seems more interested in those who think of assassinating the Tsar than in the Tsar himself. For even while he drags his reluctant soul to the mounts of Godliness, he is tempted by voices from the valleys of heresy.
This is the psychological basis for Dostoyevsky’s politics, or more accurately the psychological substance of his politics, for without the psychology there would not be much politics left. As the critic Philip Rahv has acutely written:
Dostoyevsky, despite the commitment of his will to reactionary principles, was at bottom so deeply involved in the spiritual and social radicalism of the Russian intelligentsia that he could not help attempting to break through the inner rigidity of the Orthodox tradition towards a dynamic idea of salvation; and in a certain sense what this idea came to is little more than an anarcho-Christian version of that ‘religion of humanity’ which continued to inspire the intelligentsia throughout the nineteenth century and by which Dostoyevsky himself was inspired in his youth, when... he took for his guides and mentors such heretical lovers of mankind as Rousseau, Fourier, Saint-Simon and Georges Sand.
Much of the material in The Diary of a Writer - Dostoyevsky’s sickly sneering at liberalism, his haughty disdain of and yet intimate sympathy for the intellectuals, and his occasional posing as the crotchety old-timer who peers down his nose at new-fangled ideas - can be placed easily enough within the frame of the foregoing analysis. But there is one aspect of The Diary that requires special discussion, if only because most of the reviewers have kept so oddly quiet about it. I refer to Dostoyevsky’s anti-Semitism.
In many of these articles there are anti-Semitic remarks, usually of the sort that identify ‘the Jew’ with the shrewd grasping merchant or the brilliant restless intellectual. Dostoyevsky raises the spectre of the Jews ‘reigning everywhere over stock exchanges; it is not for nothing that they control capital, that they are the masters of credit, and it is not for nothing - I repeat - that they are also the masters of international politics, and what is going to happen is known to the Jews themselves: their reign, their complete reign is approaching’.
To the modern reader, this sort of ranting is familiar enough. But what is strange is that such passages occur in an article in which Dostoyevsky defends himself, in all sincerity, against charges of anti-Semitism, and ends by proposing full legal equality for Russia’s Jews! Again the Dostoyevskian paradox: the man who can repeat the vilest filth about the Jews accepts the most radical proposal of his time with regard to their status.
Dostoyevsky’s anti-Semitism is of a kind rather special to the European intellectual. It is not the brute folk hatred, the crude identification of a people with ‘the Judas who betrayed our Lord'; it is rather an animus far more subtle in intellectual motivation and clothed in the most ‘modern’ anti-capitalist terminology. In recent years, it has flourished as the property of the more ‘radical’ wing of Nazism, which cannot be quite identified with either the coarse superstition of the East European peasant or the refined prejudice of the Connecticut suburbanite. The anti-Semitism of the displaced European intellectual is an act of spiteful revenge by one who feels himself left out against the mythical Jew who ‘controls things'; it is the ferocious upheaval of the intellectual manqué rejecting his inferiority towards the successful intellectuals identified, of course, with ‘the Jews'; it is the consequence of the most aggravated dissatisfaction with society and of an unwillingness or inability to formulate that dissatisfaction in rational terms; and it is a projection on to the Jew of precisely those qualities the intellectual finds distasteful in the bourgeois (the Jew, says Dostoyevsky, ‘loves to trade in somebody else’s labour’) and in the intellectual himself (’self-conceit and haughtiness are qualities of the Jewish character’). Dostoyevsky is not disturbed, as an American suburbanite might be, by Jewish idiosyncrasies or ‘differences'; he can remember without distaste how Jews ‘screamed’ their prayers in Siberia. For him the Jew is rather the moneychanger who must again be driven from the temple and the tempter who seduced mankind into biting the forbidden apple of knowledge.
Of course, this stereotype of the Jew is not unique to European intellectuals; a less formed and articulated version can be found among American workers and middle-class people. But in its most abstract and ‘respectable’ form it is the work of those nineteenth-century intellectuals who rebelled against the Enlightenment, the bourgeoisie, science and liberalism - and knew not what further to make of their rebellion.
Journalism is essentially a craft of self-containment; the properly functioning journalist keeps his discussion on a certain generalised level and even when writing a gossipy feuilleton he assumes, at most, a playfully personal tone that does not seriously involve his private being. But who could expect this of Dostoyevsky? Who could expect it of any man bearing within himself both an apocalyptic vision and its subversive negation?
That is why the Diary is so essentially chaotic and formless a collection. Dostoyevsky was unable to concentrate on one subject at a time and unable to maintain anything resembling an objective tone of discussion. His personality gets in the way of his writing, sometimes as a whine about his personal condition, sometimes as a spiteful remark about his contemporaries; throughout, one never is allowed to forget his sadism or sense of humiliation. In his recently republished Dostoyevsky, [2] André Gide remarks that ‘there is not... one single deformation or deviation of character - these kinks that make so many of Dostoyevsky’s characters so strangely morbid and disturbing - but which has its beginning in some humiliation’. Much the same can be said of the Dostoyevsky revealed in the Diary, a man who rises to stiff spasms of self-pride and sinks to grovellings of dubious humility. In the title phrase of his first novel, he is truly one of the insulted and injured.
Yet the disorders of this neurotic personality (extreme paranoia, elephantine sadism, incredibly sentimental and compulsive absorption in mother-figures) which ruin the Diary as a body of journalism, also lend it significance as a literary document. The articles in the Diary testify to the intimate relation between Dostoyevsky’s illness and his art, to the way in which both block his efforts at objective journalism, and to the ruthlessness with which the ‘underground man’ in Dostoyevsky, at once pathological and genius, absorbs his public personality. For that was the one thing Dostoyevsky could not do: he could not maintain a public personality.
Dostoyevsky the prophet and Dostoyevsky the novelist break through again and again; his mind, unattuned to abstraction, shifts to the drawing of pictures and the telling of incidents. Then his neurosis gains some relief and his art some sustenance. With a frightful zest he describes how Turkish soldiers strip a father’s skin off his back in the presence of his child; how a father flogs his seven-year-old girl until he almost faints from excitement; how a woman throws a little girl out of the window in a moment of pique. (In inverted form the parricide theme recurs constantly: Dostoyevsky, burdened by memories of his murdered father, is repeatedly attracted to reports of parents who are cruel to their children.) Together with the sadistic Dostoyevsky, there is a sentimental one:
Have you ever seen a child hiding in a corner, so that he may not be seen, and weeping there, twisting his little hands (yes, twisting the hands - I have seen it myself) and striking his chest with his tiny fist, not comprehending what he was doing, not fully grasping his guilt and the reason why he was being tortured, but realising only too clearly that he was not loved?
It is when Dostoyevsky the narrator breaks through that the Diary reaches greatness. Take this description of how a Russian peasant beats his wife:
Did you ever see how a peasant whips his wife? I did. He begins with a rope or a strap. Peasant life is devoid of aesthetic delights - music, theatre, magazines; naturally it has to be enlarged somehow. Tying up his wife, or thrusting her legs into the opening of a floor board, our good little peasant would probably begin - methodically, phlegmatically, even sleepily - with measured blows, not listening to the screams and entreaties - to be more correct - precisely listening to them, listening with delight, for otherwise what pleasure could he be deriving from the whipping? ... Suddenly he throws away the strap; like a madman, he seizes a stick, a bough, anything, and breaks it over her back with three last, terrific blows. No more! He quits, plants himself by the table, sighs, and sets himself to his kvass.
The politics, the chauvinism, the anti-Semitism, the hysteria, of the Diary one may wish to forget; but who can forget the picture of that peasant woman with her feet thrust into the opening of a floorboard while her husband beats her?
1. Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, Scribner, New York, 1949.
2. André Gide, Dostoyevsky, New Directions, Norfolk, 1949.