Dostoevsky on shopping in Paris

Enter a store to buy something, and the lowest sales clerk will crush you, simply crush you with his ineffable nobility. You are overwhelmed: you simply feel guilty before these salesclerks. You come to spend, say, ten francs, yet you are greeted like Lord Devonshire. For some reason you become terribly ashamed: you want to quickly assure him that you are not Lord Devonshire at all but just who you are, a modest tourist who came in to buy something for only ten francs. But the young man with a most happy appearance and ineffable nobility of soul, at the sight of whom you are ready to confess yourself a scoundrel (because he is at such a level of nobility!), begins to show you merchandise worth tens of thousands of francs. In a single minute he has covered the whole counter for you, and it occurs to you that he, the poor fellow, will have to put it all back again on your account, he, Grandison, Alcibiades, Montmorency; and on whose account? On your account; you, who with your unenviable appearance, your vices and deficiencies, and your disgusting ten francs have the impudence to disturb...

'A Nasty Story' Dostoevsky

Published in 1862 in the Dostoevsky brothers’ journal Time, A Nasty Story is one of Dostoevsky’s shorter, funnier and crueller comedies.

Actual State Councillor Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky is on his way home somewhat the worse for drink after a small birthday party with some of his colleagues, when he passes by the house of one of his subordinates. A wedding is in progress in the house, and he remembers that his subordinate, an unassuming, beaverish man named Pseldonimov, is getting married there. Pralinsky decides to gatecrash the wedding, to scatter his largesse among the crowd and then leave in glory. It all goes horribly wrong, in a series of absolutely toe-curling solecisms, terrible even by Dostoevskyan standards.

This tightly constructed, brilliant little story has strong similarities with The Double. Like that earlier tale, the story is structured around a double vision, in which the central character imagines an action or a scene in a long monologue, then the scene takes place but differently from the way it was imagined. The scene therefore takes place twice in the story, once in the mind of the character, and then in the field of action for the character but in the mind of the reader. In this way Dostoevsky examines the gap between our moral intentions and the way they work out. Like The Double, the solecism is the central narrative incident, although in this story the solecism is funnier and completely gripping. Like The Double a large part of the text is taken up with internal monologue (given in direct speech) in which Dostoevsky foreshadows the modernist stream of consciousness.

A moral fable about the dangers of too much vodka; an examination of relationships among the Petersburg bureaucratic classes; a tale of urban life; an exposure of hypocrisy; a vignette of failure, A Nasty Story is all of these and more.

One of the main concerns addressed by Dostoevsky in his non-fiction articles published around the same time in Time was the yawning gulf between the intelligentsia and the peasantry, and the various approaches to this problem espoused by the two main camps of intellectual opinion: the Westernisers and the Slavophiles. The former held that the way forward was the education of the peasants in Western science, agronomy, hygiene and history. The latter held an idealised view of the peasant and his culture, wanting to leave him unsullied by pernicious Western ways but developing a spirit of community under the auspices of Orthodoxy. Both parties betrayed in their various views an underlying paternalism and didacticism in their attitude towards the peasants, an attitude that Dostoevsky was at pains to highlight and criticise as oppressive, even offensive to the amour propre (one of Dostoevsky’s great themes) of the peasant: you see, they too are terribly sensitive. In his non-fiction Dostoevsky the polemicist is irresistibly drawn to the fictional to illustrate his ideas. In his second article on Pedantry and Literacy, for example, he paints a scene of peasants sitting around a table, staring in dismay and incomprehension at a Reader for the People (proposed by the Westernisers) which one of the peasants has just been awarded. They are discussing it:
“I hear it came straight from Petersburg.”
“What kind of reward, you silly man!” the host himself interjects. “A reward because I know how to read and write? It’s all the better for myself, isn’t it? Then what do they want to reward me for?”
“Why,” a relative says, “so that looking at you others should also try to get a reward. That’s what Grishka said the other day.”
“The Reader, price thirty kopecks,” another neighbour reads. “I daresay when you try to sell it, you won’t get five kopecks for it. They should have given you the thirty kopeks instead, Gavrila Matveich.”
“I don’t agree with you…if they had given him thirty kopeks he would have spent it on drink in a bar, but here they give him a book, The Reader, in which all the wisdom of the world is described.”
“Half a moment, my friend”, the host interrupts again. “Why then did Grigory Savich say to me at the meeting ‘Lose it, sell, exchange it, give it to anyone you like, no one will ask you to account for it. It’s your property!’ If this book had been of any use to me, why should I be selling or losing it? No, it isn’t that at all. It’s the authorities….”

Dostoevsky illustrates in this little inset scene the reaction of the peasants to any kind of paternalism, their suspicion of the intentions of the reformers, the ease with which their dignity is slighted. The fictionalising of this reaction carries far more force than any amount of polemic on the issue.

Like an inset narrative vignette in a non-fiction article, the inclusion of A Nasty Story among polemical non-fiction articles in a journal addressing contemporary issues highlights and illustrates those issues through the concentrated power of Dostoevsky’s art. The issue being highlighted is the paternalism of the educated section of society towards the uneducated, the reaction of the latter towards this, and the resulting degradation to both parties. During the early part of his evening, at his colleague’s birthday party, Pralinsky is involved in a discussion about the contemporary issue of reforms, in which he opines: ‘Philanthropy was always in order. But the reforms are not confined to that. The peasant question has been raised, and questions of law courts, and agriculture, and the revenues, and morality, and… and… and there’s no end to the questions, and all of them together, all taken at once, may well give rise to great, so to speak, oscillations’. He continuously emphasises that ‘humanity, and specifically humanity towards ones inferiors, …may serve as the cornerstone of the coming reforms, -a paternalistic humanity, note, rather than a just equality of rights. Pralinsky’s inner motivation for gatecrashing the wedding, he tells himself, is to morally raise the humble, I shall restore him to himself (a superb parody of the attitude of both Slavophiles and Westernisers towards the peasants). However, his interior monologue, which reveals more to the reader than the character himself is aware of, also says: If I repeat this five or ten times, or something else of the same kind, I shall win popularity everywhere… and the narrative voice comments in a sarcastic aside: (a man will say all sorts of things to himself, gentlemen, especially when he is in a slightly abnormal condition.)

The ‘oscillations’ which follow, horribly and hilariously exemplify the hypocrisy of Pralinsky’s paternalism, and at the same time exact revenge on it.

'Time' Dostoevsky

II

In the series of 5 articles written for his journal Time between 1861 and 1863 Dostoevsky put forward his ideas on a number of important contemporary issues, chief among which include his aesthetics, the peasant question, and education.

Russian culture during the 1860s was riven by an argument between the Utilitarians and the Aesthetes similar to that of late Victorian culture. On the one hand were the Utilitarians, Chernyeshevksy and Dobroliubov in particular (both heavily influenced by the English Utilitarians), who demanded that literature should address the social questions of the day. On the other were the Aesthetes who held the opposite, that literature should only be concerned with itself, and that true literary genius cannot be found in ‘issue’ literature. Dostoevsky positions himself more on the side of the Aesthetes, and in doing so outlines his own aesthetic position.
Art is an intrinsic part of humanity: Creation is the fundamental principle of all art…and a necessary accessory of the human spirit. Beauty is an end in itself and needs no other purpose: Beauty is useful because it is beauty, because a constant need for beauty and its highest ideal resides in mankind.
The demand of the Utilitarians that art be subordinate to social purpose is a restriction of the freedom of the artist to choose his own subjects, and contrary to the nature of art itself, which is both an expression of and an answer to the need for beauty in humanity: Perhaps it is in this that the greatest secret of creative art lies: namely that the image of beauty created by art at once becomes something to be worshipped without any conditions. A work of art whose artistic value is compromised by extra-artistic concerns can have no other value either: Art will be true to man only if its freedom of movement is not hampered. The worth of art is best measured not by its aim, as the Utilitarians would have it, but by the fullest possible harmony between the artistic idea, and the form in which it is expressed, in a harmony between form and content, especially in the realms of specificity and authenticity. In order for a work of art to have true ‘usefulness’ it must be authentic, true to itself and its times. This is the mark of true art: it is always contemporary, vital and useful.
Apart from the social aspect of this debate, in terms of an aesthetics, Dostoevsky prefigures Oscar Wilde, who maintained: no work of art can be tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be consistent with itself is the question.

The peasant question was of course the most burning issue of the early part of the decade. Emancipation in 1861 had brought no real (economic or social) benefits to the peasants, and Dostoevsky and others were conscious of a huge rift between the intelligentsia, and the peasantry. On the one hand Westernisers wanted to raise the peasants to their level through education. On the other hand the Slavophiles had an idealistic, unrealistic attitude towards them. Dostoevsky is harshly critical of this didacticism inherent in both positions: The peasant will never never trust you. Do you really imagine that the common people won’t realize that although you seem terribly anxious to teach them something, you are also terribly anxious to conceal something from them because you think they are as yet unfit to have that knowledge? In place of paternalism Dostoevsky puts forward a fraternalism born of his own intimate knowledge of the peasants –unique among the intelligentsia- and of a more historical perspective. Social reformers who laugh at the peasant prejudices, without realising that the prejudices are dear to the peasants, do not look at things historically. He is adamant that before the people will listen to the intelligentsia, the latter must earn the love and respect of the former. The common people might find out that they have a lot to teach the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia need to approach the peasants on equal terms, and need to make the first move. For Dosteovsky, this unity of peasantry and intelligentsia will result in a new Russia, one that will embody…the extraordinary aspiration of the Russian tribe for universal human values.

Concommitant to this view of the peasant question, was the question of the education of the peasantry, another burning issue of post emancipation Russia. Dostoevsky is adamant that literacy should be available to all, not just the privileged peasants, as some of the Slavophiles held. If literacy is bestowed as a kind of privilege it will cause superciliousness and arrogance in people. The only way to prevent this is to make literacy available to everybody so that its privileged status is removed. Dostoevsky savagely derides the efforts of educators who seek to provide specially designed reading material for the masses in order to educate them into the national character, Russian history, basic hygiene and science. No real improvement will be accepted by the masses as an improvement, but rather as an act of oppression, unless the desire for such an improvement has arisen in the masses. The best way of stimulating such a desire for improvement is by promoting basic literacy first, but not of didactic reading material (beloved by the Utilitarians) but of reading material that is entertaining, true to itself, and meets the peasants’ own needs: Let reading be at first nothing but an entertainment for them, something they can enjoy; they will realise the usefulness of it all later.
This is quite in keeping with Dostoevsky’s aesthetics: It is in the nature of good literature to purify taste and reason. Good literature is in itself an education, namely, self-education: Without true serious and correct education, there appears at once a phenomenon in society which is harmful and pernicious to the highest degree: Knowledge without knowledge. It’s interesting to speculate what Dostoevsky would have made of our own powerpoint enslaved, bullet-point driven, hyperlinked, over-informed but intellectually lazy educational practices.

Dostoevsky’s non-fiction writing is highly dialogic, which is to say that his ideas are never presented in a straightforward exposition but always in response to an article by another critic in a rival journal. He engages directly with the other writers and journals and controversies of his time. Matlaw writes that Belinsky’s critical method is to expound the meaning as it appears to him, largely through comments on extensive quotations. His work gives the impression of having been improvised, written at white heat. It is prolix, ill organized, the style journalistic, obscure, confusing and often grating, but remarkably vigrous and direct. It might be a description of Dostoevsky’s own journalism. It’s not that Dostoevsky eschews logic in arriving at his conclusions but it’s that he prefers to lambast his readers and critics with withering sarcasm, passionate remonstrance and the irresistible fictionalising of opposing arguments into characters: the German smoking his cigar, the Frenchman superciliously nodding at everything. His polemical voice is characterised by digression, interruption, the assumption of different conflicting voices, epigrams, repetitions, jokes, and huge leaps in logic. At the same time he is careful to provide pointers and signal language so that the reader can follow the argument. This is by no means quiet skilful persuasion but passionate, loud urgent sincere argumentation, idealistic and practical together, never boring and never dry.

In April 1863, Strakhov, one of the team of critics on Time, ran an article on the Polish uprising. The article was deemed revolutionary, and the journal was shut down.

Dostoevsky on beauty in art

Art is as much a necessity for man as eating and drinking. The need for beauty and creation embodying it is inseparable from man, and without it man would perhaps have refused to live in the world. Man craves it, finds and accepts beauty without any conditions just because it is beauty and worships it with veneration.... and it is perhaps in this that the greatest secret of creative art lies, namely that the image of beauty created by art at once becomes something to be worshipped without any conditions.... The need for beauty is felt more strongly when men are at variance with their reality, in a state of disharmony, in conflict, that is to say, when they are most of all alive.

'Time' Dostoevsky

I

In December 1859 Dostoevsky finally returned to Petersburg after 10 years in exile. He had two immediate concerns. The first was literature, and the second was money. Almost a year later, he and his brother Mikhail launched their journal, Time, in an attempt to provide themselves with an income, an outlet for Fyodor’s fiction, and a vehicle for their political views. With them on the editorial board, were the young critics Strakhov and Grigoryev. Between them the four men were known as the ‘movement of the soil’ or ‘the grassroots movement’. In addition to Dostoevsky’s writing, the journal published works by Turgenev, Ostrovsky, Nekrasov and Schedrin. The journal was well received by the public, with 4,000 subscribers in the first year; and the presence in it of works by the editors of their commercial rival The Contemporary, attests to the fact that at the beginning, Time was more closely allied to the Westernisers than the Salvophiles.

Between September 1860, and September 1864, Dostoevsky wrote four manifestos (the fourth was for the journal Epoch, which he founded on his own after the tragic early death of his brother). Notwithstanding the opinions expressed in his articles for the journals, and in the range of views of the other contributors, the manifestos are interesting as statements of intent, of editorial policy, an outline of his position, the general direction of his social and political thinking from this time onward.

In these manifestos, Dostoevsky positions himself between the Westernisers and the Slavophiles by combining their arguments. His position is a kind of resurgent Russian nationalism, which combines the best features of the Westernisers and the Slavophiles, Western science and Enlightenment progress with Orthodox cultural achievements.

He is at pains to minimise the fears of the Westernisers (the ‘theoreticians’) that Russian nationalism will mean the rolling back of the advances of Western science and the benefits from it. He insists that good ideas which come from the West must not be rejected but must be Russianised. As for the Slavophiles (the ‘doctrinaires’) he castigates them for their continual and devisive criticism of Russian weaknesses, and their insistence on raising the peasants to their level. Unlike the conservative and often frankly luddite Slavophiles he holds that native science will flourish when the necessity for it rises spontaneously from the people. By this time in the early ‘60s the Westernisers/Slavophile debate had moved on to the controversy between the ‘Fathers’ and ‘Sons’, and the plight of the post-emancipation peasantry. Dostoevsky’s attempt to unite both these parties may be seen as an attempt to reignite the burning issues of his youth, or as his misunderstanding of the new tenor of the times in the capital after his 10 years away from it, or as a sign that the old issues were still lingering in the new political climate under Alexander II.

Dostoevsky sees the way forward as a unity of the peasantry and the intelligentsia, and that the first step must come from the intelligentsia. He is at pains to stress that the positive introduction of a new idea is more important than the constant criticism and abuse of old ideas. His positive contribution is Union with our national source. He introduces the image of the soil in the first manifesto, intended as a kind of symbol of a bedrock of future progress, but gradually, the metaphor crystalizes, until it becomes literally ‘the soil’, much to the puzzlement of his critics, who are not sure what he means. For Dostoevsky, the soil is synonymous with the birthright of every Russian to own a piece of land: One cannot be a Russian without general right to land. This is a very subtle attack on those who naively thought that the question of the peasantry had been resolved by their emancipation in February 1861. In fact, the emancipation was only a legal gesture; the real plight of the peasant was just as miserable as before: stricken with poverty and ignorance, crippled with taxes and dues, and in debt to the landowning classes. Emancipation had done nothing in real terms to ease their lives because they had not been granted land, and no provision had been made for their education, thus leading the way for their economic regeneration and engagement in the cultural life of the nation. Dostoevsky’s vagueness on the meaning of the ‘soil’ is deliberate, partly to stay on the right side of the authorities (ever conscious of his status as former political prisoner) and partly in an attempt to gain as wide a readership as possible. (It must be remembered that Dostoevsky was a professional writer who needed to make a living, and that he indeed saw himself as such.)

What he was clear about, however, was the means to achieve this union with the national source, and that was: literature. Literature is today one of the main manifestations of our Russian life. Literature must remain free, from mediocrity, and from attempts by authority to control it. We are not afraid of authorities, and we despise servility in literature. We are for literature, we are for art. We believe in their independence and irresistible power. We obtained literature by our own efforts, it is a product of our own life, and that is why we love it so much and hold it so dear, why we pin our hopes on it.
It’s difficult, perhaps, for a modern Western audience to understand why the answer to social and political problems was sought in literature: why they pinned their hopes on it. Western intellectuals, since Sartre asked What is literature? have agonised over the role literature is to play in the political sphere; an agonising which comes from an initial distinction in the Western mind between the discourses of sociology/politics on the one hand, and the discourses of literature and literary criticism on the other. In the Russian mind, however, this distinction has never existed. Literature in mid 19th century Russia was part of the discourse of ‘social thought’, an overlapping of the discourses of philosophy, science, sociology, politics and literature best exemplified in the writings of Belinsky, Dobroliubov, Herzen and Chernyashevsky. Commentators of all kinds and in all periods have emphasised repeatedly the extraordinary power and force literature has in Russian culture to affect change. Readers looked to literature to provide answers and directions. Part of the great controversy around Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, for example, was that the author refused to provide answers, and left the authorial stance deliberately ambiguous. This open-endedness was an outrage, a betrayal of readers' cultural expectations.

The tone of these manifestos ranges from the polite and deferential to his readers, to the sarcastic, to the hectoring, idealistic, burningly sincere and savage attacks on what he calls ‘whistlers’ and ‘shouters’: those writers and critics who changed their tune according to their current employers’ policies. In the first manifesto Dostoevsky mentions 1812 as a force that united all classes of Russian society (this was a common contemporary trope), but it was also his personal experience of the people from his prison days that played a major role in the formation of his view that the way forward lay in unity between the intelligentsia and the peasantry, and that the latter had so much to teach the former. As he wrote in Notes from the House of Death: The best and most outstanding characteristic of our common people is their sense of justice and their desire for it…There is not much men of learning can teach the common people. I would even say the reverse: it is they who should take few lessons from the common people. His prison experiences put Dostoevsky in a unique position among the intelligentsia: he was practically the only surviving working writer who could boast of any prolonged and sustained contact with the peasantry, and his words were therefore stamped with personal truth. Even Tolstoy recognised this. “Tell Dostoevsky I love him”, he wrote to a mutual friend after reading Notes.

It’s difficult, in our post-fascist era, to read Dostoevsky’s remarks about nationalism, to accept their tone, with equanimity, but we must be careful to remember that he was writing from the other side of the chasm, from before the fearful damage that nationalism wreaked on Europe in the century after his death.

Berlin on thought

Our thoughts, the terms in which they occur, the symbols themselves, are what they are, are themselves determined by the actual structure of our world.